Do any readers know where I might be able to get a copy of an English translation of Francis Ponge’s Notebook of the Pine Woods? I had a copy at one time that I bought used decades ago from Green Apple Books in San Francisco – it was as I recall published as an issue of Cid Corman’s Origin, in the second or third series. But somehow that copy walked off from my bookshelves & I haven’t been able to track down another. I’m disconsolate at the gap in my bookshelf – Ponge to my mind has been the most important prose poet of the last century, and Notebook was/is a particularly valuable work.

 

Actually, I’ve known about this disappearance for several years – it happened before I left Berkeley in 1995. What brought it so acutely into focus the past few days, however, is a fine little pamphlet I just picked up, Vegetation, a half dozen pieces written by Ponge between the 1940s & the 1970s, translated by Lee Fahnestock and published as a twenty-page chapbook by Red Dust Books originally in 1988. The Cultural Services division of the French Embassy (presumably to Washington, D.C.) funded a second printing in 1995. I’d never seen a copy when I found it listed in, of all places, Amazon.

 

For the most part, Americans were introduced to the prose poem by Robert Bly in his publications The Fifties and The Sixties, and by George Hitchcock in his own journal of that same period, Kayak, in ways that very much codified the prose poem as practiced especially by that most surreal of Benedictine monks, Max Jacob. Bly’s intervention came at a time when the only alternative French poetic prose in print in English translation belonged to St.-John Perse, championed by T.S. Eliot, by then an arch-conservative. The most prolific English-language writer of prose poetry, Gertrude Stein, had been dead since 1946, & her influence during this same period was at its absolute nadir, her memory kept alive beyond her role as bon vivant & art collector almost entirely by Robert Duncan & Jerome Rothenberg. Thus, it was really only when Nathaniel Tarn published first Ponge’s Soap & Victor Segalen’s Stele in the Grossman/Cape Goliard series at the every end of the 1960s that poets in America could see that Stein’s Tender Buttons & Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations were not, in fact, flukes and that what was possible as prose poetry stretched the gamut of the imagination. The leap from that moment to Ashbery’s Three Poems, Creeley’s A Day Book & Mabel, and Clark Coolidge’s first ventures into prose can be counted almost in hours, rather than months or years.

 

Notebook, which I haven’t read in perhaps 20 years, is not a prose poem in the sense, say, of Soap, nor of the works translated into English by Serge Gavronsky as The Power of Language and The Sun Placed in the Abyss, nor by Beth Archer in The Voice of Things. Notebook documents a period during which Ponge, an active member of the Resistance who was being hunted by the Nazis & the Vichy French regime, took refuge in a cabin in a pine woods and, while there, proceeded to imagine what it might be like to write a perfect poem, which I recall (perhaps imperfectly) to be a sonnet. In the Notebook he writes the work over & over & over, carefully documenting the most minute changes until it becomes evident that a “perfect” poem can exist only as an idea, that a text is a thing that could be refined forever without ever getting to an “ultimate” core.

 

It’s difficult thinking, let alone writing, about a text that exists solely as memory & which one could read only in translation even if one could obtain a copy. The two copies I have been able to locate are (a) the original 1947 French edition & (b) in rare bookshops in Switzerland (& priced accordingly). So the work exists for me right now in a particularly Borgesian psychic space.

 

It was the first piece in Vegetation, a text Fahnestock translates as “The Carnation” – it’s an awkward tho probably unavoidable choice since Ponge actively plays with the letters of the French œillet – that made me long so for Notebook. Although Fahnestock credits Ponge’s 1976 La rage de l’expression for the poem, the text was composed between 1941 & ’44, roughly the same period as Notebook, & was originally published in a small edition in 1946, entitled L’œillet – La Guêpe – Le Mimosas.

 

In this nine page meditation, Ponge seeks not so much to represent the flower in the poem as to bring out certain qualities that are unique to the plant, that might be considered its contribution to form & to thinking. This is precisely the investigative tone that Ponge takes in all of his signature works. It is also the inhuman – I mean that term literally – quality that Ponge seeks in form, which is why Archer’s inept anthropomorphizing, such as her title The Voice of Things (a more literal version would have read Taking the Part of Things), does such violence to Ponge’s work. While I think it’s relatively hard to get a good bead on what Ponge was seeking by adopting the investigative mode – we’ve seen the figure of the researcher comically transformed not just by such pataphysical interventions as the Toronto Research Group, but by the academy itself in recent decades – the idea of poetry as a mechanism for exploring & recognizing the forms of the world (rather than merely superimposing the cookie-cutter patterns of poetry onto the world) remains largely unexplored in American poetry outside of Ronald Johnson’s ARK. While it seems easy enough to imagine this mode in debased forms – think of a Jules Feiffer comic-strip dancer performing a “dance to spring” – Ponge, in Soap, Vegetation & elsewhere makes it evident that there is a perfectly serious side to this question yet to fully fathomed.