Francis Ponge

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Today at early I left each shop I entered and only one
I left didn't not take £10, happily floundered on the useless;
words doing things, and money's changing hands!
Today I've bought a copy of his Selected, which is.
In my hands, not yet toads, (I'm only young!) each line
is some aborted thought replicated in the still animated
by an inside and an outside, marred (I'm sure I mean
married) by the friction of reading. Francis Ponge
his poems, read with your eyes, or one of your brains,
break like a loud smile, walking up a street, as you look
at your hands again, as if you'd looked at them before,
and notice one of his sentences, or glib philosophy
broken out in light sweat, as you continually affirm
and re-affirm his love affair with things by being... a thing.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 17 April 2004 13:16 (twenty-one years ago)

Talk about him!

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 17 April 2004 13:17 (twenty-one years ago)

Haha, more ILx posts should be written as poems. Or, less?

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 17 April 2004 13:24 (twenty-one years ago)

The Mollusc

The mollusc is a being - almost a quality. It doesn't need a
skeleton, just a rampart; something like paint in a tube.
Nature has abandoned all hope here of shaping plasma. She
merely shows her attachment by carefully sheltering it in a jewel
case, more beautiful inside than out.
So it's not just a gob of spit; but a truly precious reality.
The mollusc is endowed with tremendous energy for self-closure.
Strictly speaking it's nothing but a muscle, a hinge, a door-closer
and its door.

[...]

Francis Ponge.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 17 April 2004 13:48 (twenty-one years ago)

Try again:

The Mollusc

	The mollusc is a being - almost a quality.  It doesn't need a
skeleton, just a rampart; something like paint in a tube.
Nature has abandoned all hope here of shaping plasma. She
merely shows her attachment by carefully sheltering it in a jewel
case, more beautiful inside than out.
So it's not just a gob of spit; but a truly precious reality.
The mollusc is endowed with tremendous energy for self-closure.
Strictly speaking it's nothing but a muscle, a hinge, a door-closer
and its door.

[...]

Francis Ponge.

cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 17 April 2004 13:48 (twenty-one years ago)

I was actually thinking of ponge the other day--I went to a charles simic reading where he said he tried to write a series of poems about inaninmate objects, until he discovered that he didn't care about them. You might like sens-plastique (sp?) by maurce I-can't-remember-his-last-name.

kenchen, Saturday, 17 April 2004 19:01 (twenty-one years ago)

I always liked Francis Ponge, but I'm afraid I have nothing to say about him. If you can find the collection The Voice of Things, you might want to pick that up as well. I think I like those translations better. (It may just be the result of having read them first, and at an impressionable age.)

Rockist Scientist (rockistscientist), Saturday, 17 April 2004 23:15 (twenty-one years ago)

(My first post is some kind of unnatural (i.e. instinctive) sonnet with a turn which doesn't announce itself until the last... word.)

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 18 April 2004 00:03 (twenty-one years ago)

(Sorry, I'm drunk. It's OK.)

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 18 April 2004 00:12 (twenty-one years ago)

The azaleas are out
of my mind. I don't
need you to console
me. It's OK, I know
I've changed. Have
you changed? Has
he changed? Not since
last time I read, not so
long ago I can't figure
out my memory of,
him. The azaleas are
out. In bloom of
thought, gusting across
Buchanan Street or
Sauchiehall Street, I'll
think of Francis, next
to all other thoughts and
all other thoughts of
things and luck and...

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 18 April 2004 00:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah, more posts to ILx, however embarassing, should be poems. Verse line, whatever. Don't be afraid to be ashamed. Commit yourself to some of your loves?

cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 18 April 2004 00:19 (twenty-one years ago)

This article on Ponge
may be
my favourite
piece
of writing
by myself.

Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 19 April 2004 06:31 (twenty-one years ago)

I
love
it.

cozen (Cozen), Monday, 19 April 2004 17:34 (twenty-one years ago)


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