Mute Objects of Expression

Praise

No poet has looked more determinedly or more ferociously at things than Francis Ponge. —Peter Sirr

Ponge forfeits no resource of language, natural or unnatural. He positively dines upon the etymological root, seasoning it with fantastic gaiety and invention. —James Merrill

Francis Ponge’s prose accepts the truth that things themselves defy our language. The writing accepts this, but is not resigned to it: in Ponge, the presence of trees, ‘the slow production of wood,’ senility itself, bespeak a blazing conflagration that has not happened, which is to say that in Ponge, Being holds out against its every nemesis, and both Being and Non-Being offer themselves to our dream of silence. Ponge is the great poet of our being with things. —Leonard Schwartz

Ponge wrote like a scientist whose language is poetry. He was endlessly inquisitive about his subjects–including the wasp, birds, the carnation, “The Pleasure of the Pine Woods”—but what we end up learning is how the mind animates the world. —American Poet Journal