Unfinished Ode to Mud

"There is certainly a shadow history to do with the rise of prose in general here. I realize also that we’ve basically stayed in Paris for all of these books, one of the great modern metropolises. And these are places which are increasingly dominated by prose as the way in which an increasingly literate population consumes information and entertainment, in cheap books and newspapers. Some of Baudelaire’s prose poems, for example, first appeared as feuilletons , literary snippets in a daily newspaper. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In an age of mass literacy, prose is also essential to political influence— Mein Kampf sells millions of copies—as well as being the medium of the administration of power, and so also empire: ‘Caesar himself is patron of our grammar books’, as Charles Bernstein says. For a poet to inhabit this medium, as Ponge does, and bring it to bear on the most apparently modest of objects—to make tentative propositions in prose—is to in some way try to recover the life of prose, because so much prose is effectively dead or deadening. Yes. In the 1930s, Ponge worked in a publisher’s offices, which he hated. He was a union representative who went on strike and later joined the Communist Party—and then during the war, the Resistance. His first, classic collection of poems, Le parti pris de choses (1942), has recently been translated as Partisan of Things , which I think brings out its spirit of opposition to what Marxists would call ‘reification’: turning people into things, through their labour. All poems, he thought, should be considered “reasons for living happily.” Unfinished Ode to Mud is perhaps my favorite translation of Ponge, although there are a number of other good ones. In the history of the prose poem, there’s a case for saying that that Ponge brings it to a kind of perfection. This is not to say that everything after him is a disappointment, but he somehow discovers an essence of the poetic in prose which comes from the way in which he proceeds by very simply trying to define the thing in front of him. It’s as though he takes a step back from Gertrude Stein, and just takes the object in front of him as it is, like the oyster or the blackberry. He doesn’t do what Stein does, which is to go around it; he tries to focus on it. But he’s so attuned or sensitive to the dangers of closing down a definition that he develops this style where what he’s saying is always open to a further refinement. He writes in a very provisional manner, as though he’s just drafting a poem—as if these prose poems are just notes towards verse poems that he’s going to write and then doesn’t. But all that is part of his extremely charming irony: he’s actually becoming very precise indeed about his perception of this object. I think that’s very nicely put—and it’s borne out by the influence Ponge had on so many prose poets after him, which is something I tried to show in the anthology. His method is ostensibly scientific: he takes prose as a supposedly objective medium. From childhood, he was fascinated by reading the dictionary. It’s as though he puts on this white coat of prose to go into his laboratory, but then the great joke—and I do think of Ponge as a kind of comedian—is that actually, everything he’s dealing with is slippery and alive. And as soon as he starts to describe it objectively, the subjective enters. Every sentence of Ponge is metaphorical and self-reflexive; whatever object he’s describing, it turns out he’s describing a metaphor for the process of writing, too. “Whatever object he’s describing, it turns out he’s describing a metaphor for the process of writing, too” For example. What is rain? You could give a one sentence definition of it, but instead, in “Rain” Ponge gives you amazing, dazzling paragraphs which really attempt to capture that sense of what it is to look at rain, what it’s doing, out of a window. To really attend to how it splashes differently in different places—and how prose might be a way of catching every single perception. This, of course, works exactly against that tendency to close down and define. So there’s this constant tragicomic struggle against trying to be simple. In Ponge’s poetry, words are always coming alive and running away from him, like Mickey Mouse’s brooms and buckets in “The Sorceror’s Apprentice.”"