A copy of Cid Corman’s translation of Things, which includes “Notebook of the Pine Woods,” is on its way to me at this very moment. Thanks to the folks who pointed me in the right direction, especially Joseph Massey.

 

 

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Attempting to find the form of the carnation in language is an interesting, inherently problematic proposition. Part of what I like about Francis Ponge is that, unlike Ronald Johnson, the American with the closest sense of “found form,” Ponge prefers the non-human & quotidian. Where Johnson’s models include arks & spires, Ponge turns instead to bars of soap, flowers such as the carnation or the lowly asparagus. It’s not as though Johnson’s models are symmetrical & Ponge’s not, but rather that Johnson’s models foreground their symbolic capital, while Ponge’s are less direct even when, as in the instance of soap immediately after the end of World War 2, an unstated symbolism proves no less powerful.

 

Ponge's expression of the form of the carnation is worth noting, at least as it comes through Lee Fahnestock's translation. The part of the flower that is most visibly replicated in the poem is the flower's frilly nature, which comes out through the deployment of words that are not common in contemporary poetry: dentate, denticulate, jabot, magondo, sternutatory. I can't even find a reasonable source for magondo, a word that shows up as a place name in some South African countries and also as a surname, but which is also one type of short-finned porpoise. Sternutatory —  causing one to sneeze — and jabot (a word women will recognize, but men are not apt to unless they are given to wearing tuxedos with some regularity) — a frilly front to a blouse or shirt — suggest that these words are not accidents of translation.

 

The other aspect of Ponge's interest in the carnation worth noting is that the poet is hypersensitive to the possible roles of violence in the plant's life — not simply the potential to be pulled up by its roots, but even in its excessive (to Ponge's eye) sense of frill & presentation of allergens. This passage is as over-the-top as it gets:

 

Throng pour out of communion in a delta

Or lacy white underpants of a young girl
   who looks to her linens

Constantly giving off a sort of perfume

That almost — such pleasure — brings on a sneeze

 

Trumpets gorged        mouths filled

With the redundance of their own expression

 

Throats entirely gorged by tongues

 

Their petals their lips torn

By the violence of their cries of their expressions

 

Puckered creased crimped crushed

Fringed festooned flogged

Rumpled curled cockled

Quilled waffled waved

Slashed ripped pleated tattered

Flounced whorled undulated denticulated

 

This isn't the sense of violence one might get from the television documentarian who films a stop-time version of a flower bursting through the soil, but it's not unrelated either. One wonders what Ponge might have done had he had more of contemporary sense of the way ecologies are transformed by the invasion of non-native species (viz. the eucalyptus in California), or the way in which humans intervene in nature (genetically modified foods would have been a great topic for him) — it's not just that broccoli is named for the man who first joined cauliflower to a green leafed kin — some variant of kale — even corn can be understood as a human invention.

 

But even as Ponge's piece incorporates elements of the carnation, it does not — in fact, I think it rather openly rejects — the idea of simply creating a carnation-like literary work. For the most part, this prose poem like so many others by Ponge, reads like a surrealist's notebook with the meditational, even discursive aspect of the notebook very much in the foreground. Sections like the one above are brought into the text, but never in a way that proposes to "naturalize" them.