The Table - Softcover

Ponge, Francis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1939663245 ISBN 13: 9781939663245

Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2017

Synopsis

The final chapter in Francis Ponge’s interrogation of unassuming objects

Written from 1967 to 1973 over a series of early mornings in seclusion in his country home, The Table offers a final chapter in Francis Ponge’s interrogation of the unassuming objects in his life: in this case, the table upon which he wrote. In his effort to get at the presence lying beneath his elbow, Ponge charts out a space of silent consolation that lies beyond (and challenges) scientific objectivity and poetic transport. This is one of Ponge’s most personal, overlooked, and―because it was the project he was working on when he died―his least processed works. It reveals the personal struggle Ponge engaged in throughout all of his writing, a hesitant uncertainty he usually pared away from his published texts that is at touching opposition to the manufactured, “durable mother” of the table on and of which he here writes.

About this title

About the Author

Francis Ponge (1899–1988) was both a giant of French 20th-century poetry and one of its humblest practitioners. The poet of “things,” he practiced a poetic contemplation—usually in the form of his own unique brand of hesitant, searching prose poem—of the everyday objects that share our existence. He did not so much reinvent the shell, cigarette, soap, pebble, sun, oyster or asparagus, as forge and share with them a new language.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wakefield Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1939663245
• ISBN 13: 9781939663245
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104