Aragon transi par le chant

"The Rhapsody of Things as They Are":Stevens, Francis Ponge, and the Impossible Everyday Andrew Epstein In the early 1950s, a young Korean poet named Peter Lee sent Wallace Stevens a group of his own poems, triggering an extensive correspondence with the older poet, as well as several meetings in Hartford, Connecticut, where the two discussed poetry.1 As Lee recalled, at one of their meetings Stevens gave him some intriguing advice: "When I asked him whom I should read he recommended Randall Jarrell and two French poets, Francis Ponge and René Char" (qtd. in Brazeau 137). Ever since Stevens made his famous remark in "Adagia" that "French and English constitute a single language" (CPP 914), if not before, readers have acknowledged the poet's Francophilia and abiding interest in all things French, so it is not surprising to learn that Stevens named French poets in response to his young admirer's request for tips on whom to read. But Francis Ponge? The avant-garde writer who became famous for his strange prose poems devoted to humble everyday objects, like a candle, cigarette, or pebble? In spite of the similarities between Stevens and Ponge, the two poets have rarely been mentioned in the same breath. Even though Stevens scholarship has long grappled with a wide range of issues related to the poet's interest in France and French literature, the parallels between Stevens and Ponge have gone virtually unnoticed, despite this tantalizing clue that Stevens knew and admired the French poet's work.2 Twenty-five years younger than Stevens, Ponge began publishing his idiosyncratic prose poems in the 1920s and 1930s and quickly became affiliated with the Surrealist movement. Although he forged important friendships with poets like André Breton and Paul Éluard, Ponge was determined to go his own way, steering clear of close attachment to any particular avant-garde communities or political movements, despite a relatively short-lived and unsatisfying stint as a member of the Communist Party. During World War II, Ponge took part in the Resistance, continuing to write poems while hiding in the countryside and assisting the Underground. In 1942, he published his groundbreaking and best-known volume, Le Parti pris des choses, usually translated as Taking the Side of Things (for one such translation, see The Voice of Things). Suddenly, Ponge [End Page 47] found his work widely discussed and celebrated, thanks to a famous 1944 essay by Jean-Paul Sartre entitled "L'Homme et les choses" ("Man and Things"), which argued for Ponge as an exemplar of a phenomenological and materialist approach to a universe of things. In the books that followed, Ponge continued to publish shorter prose poems about common objects and animals, but also began composing methodological pieces (to which he gave the hybrid name "Proêmes") that exhaustively reflect upon his own poetics and creative processes, as well as longer works of self-reflexive prose that intertwine theory and poetry, commentary and practice, such as "The Notebook of the Pine Woods," "The Prairie," and "The Sun Placed in the Abyss." After being championed by those invested in existentialism, phenomenology, and the nouveau roman in the 1960s and 1970s, Ponge's linguistic play and self-consciousness made him an ideal subject for the radically different approach of the Tel Quel circle and a new generation of structuralist and poststructuralist theorists and critics, including Jacques Derrida, whose book Signéponge/ Signsponge playfully explores the vertiginous dance of the signifier (including puns on the poet's own name) in Ponge's poetry. Although Ponge remains much better known in France than abroad, he has quietly served as an important touchstone and influence for a surprisingly wide range of American poets and other writers, including a number who have translated his work, such as Cid Corman, Robert Bly, C. K. Williams, and Karen Volkman. A slew of writers from diverse aesthetic camps have written of their admiration for Ponge, from the elegant formalist poets James Merrill and Richard Wilbur to the postmodern novelists Paul Auster and Italo Calvino (who celebrates Ponge in his Why Read the Classics?).3 Ponge has proven especially important to more recent experimental poets like Ron Silliman, one of the...

Dear Ian, as a member of this Review’s Editorial Board and as a scholar of Williams, I want to inform you and our readers that I have just published a book on Botteghe Oscure and American literature (Botteghe Oscure e la letteratura statunitense, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2021, pp. 378), in which Williams plays a significant role. As the book is in Italian (except for all the documents in English cited in it), I am writing this letter to alert our readers of its publication.When six years ago I spent a month at the Ransom Center in Austin to read in its holdings concerning the literary journal Botteghe Oscure (1948–1960), I was astonished to find out that in the US everybody interested in literature—from the US or elsewhere—knew of the publication which is the topic of my volume. In my own country, when I mentioned the topic of my research I always had to explain that no, I had not changed my interests: I was not writing on the Italian Communist Party (which used to have its national head-quarters in Via delle Botteghe Oscure). “Nemo propheta in patria” [Nobody is a prophet in their own land] referred, this time, to the journal not to the Party!But, perhaps, my compatriots had some justification for being so oblivious: the journal—which Princess Marguerite Caetani (born Gibert Chapin, from Waterford, Connecticut) founded, sponsored, and edited—published more US writers than from any other nation and language: of slightly more than 600, there were 210 that came out in its 25 issues. In the Western world, this review was the first one to publish—basically without translations—its contributions in five (six, Williams would say) languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and . . . the American idiom, of course! Previously, while she was living with her family in France, Princess Caetani had founded and sponsored the review Commerce (1924–1932; edited by Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fabre, and Valery Larbaud), in which contributions from all over the world and from the past as well as from the present, were almost always translated into French. Botteghe Oscure, her second editorial enterprise, was thus decidedly more cosmopolitan. Even if her main aim was to present young, still unknown writers, Marguerite Caetani was proud to also propose works by such established artists as e. e. Cummings, Marianne. Moore, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, George Santayana, Robert P. Warren, Marguerite Young, and Williams. The correspondence that she entertained with these and younger writers (from James Wright, to Richard Wilbur, from Robert Lowell to Peter Viereck, from Cynthia Ozick to W.S. Merwin and Elizabeth Bishop)—held in the Marguerite Caetani Fund in Rome or in several US Archives—is of great interest both for the opinions expressed in these letters and for the idiosyncrasies as well as well for the acts of generosity and dignity that sometimes emerge.Through her half-sister, Katherine Garrison Chapin (a fellow in American letters at the Library of Congress and the spouse of the former Attorney General Francis Biddle), Marguerite Caetani had been put in touch with Williams. He appeared four times in the review with previously unpublished work, as this was one of its prerequisites: in 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1953. Since she was so lavish in her payments that authors would often (more or less gladly) meet her requests, Williams too, on one occasion, had to change a few words in The Desert Music as she found them too . . . daring. At times, she was “from another generation and New England,” as her editorial secretary, Eugene Walter, once described her. But this is not all: for a few months, their relationship suffered from some incomprehension as some letters show. Loyalty and understanding being at the basis of their personality, however, this coldness did not last long: when Marguerite Caetani heard of his second stroke, she immediately wrote to him and their friendship continued on definitely firmer ground. So much so that Williams wrote a very warm review of the book (published in the US) by the French poet whom she valued above all others: René Char. To please her he may have gone even further: he may also have written a Preface to this volume—a Preface that, not authored by any of the several critics whom she addressed to this purpose, was finally rejected by the director of Random House and that I have been able to transcribe in the present volume.These years of research on and about the journal made me more aware of something that, of course, is intrinsic to the life and the vicissitudes of a periodical: the encounter/exchange, debate/fight that is always entailed in an enterprise devised to promote culture must also bear with much human frailty.

Denise Levertov's introduction to and translations of the French poet Eugene Guillevic in her volume Guillevic: Selected Poems are revealing of her own poetics, most particularly in terms of her relation to nature. Indeed, a poet's take on another poet usually reveals as much about the former as it does about the latter, and often is motivated by what the former wishes to take away from those materials, or reinforce in herself. Guillevic's interest is in and to a great degree so is Levertov's, although for her is often placed into the context of other researches. The term nature, however, begs the questions relevant to what is being invented in these poetries, and why it might be that Levertov found Guillevic's poetry engaging enough to spend her time translating it. First of all, nature here seems to mean objects, both manufactured ones that still bear the traces of their original mineral identity, and unworked ones that comprise part of the world of non-human force: in short, objects are things that present themselves as heavy, dense, opaque, and real, over and apart from human identity and use. But also means immediacy, a reference not only to presence but also to a present tense that, it is held, we can actually grasp by relating to a past: which means, in this case, by relating it to the eternal, to the fact that it always was, and will be, as if presence itself were a proof of the eternal. But above all, what is of interest in these two poetries is the invocation of in terms of a notion of the unconscious, as if there were a way in which the raw materials of the physical world were not merely alien activities but parts of ourselves still beyond our reach. Rather than locating the unconscious in some mythical elsewhere, or in a psychic compartment that, if one is lucky, one might come into contact with only through speech, these poets locate the unconscious, to slightly alter the context of a Husserlian formula (but only slightly), in the things themselves. A provocative thought--that the unconscious lies in the raw materials and physical objects that surround us. I suspect that sculptors and painters are more aware of this possibility than are others. Guillevic is that rare serious poet who thinks he sees a limit to language, a point at which poetry gives way to the contemplation of things as they are--a point Levertov herself simultaneously posits and desires to go beyond. Born in 1907, Eugene Guillevic is generally thought of as one of the major French lyric poets of his generation, along with, perhaps, Jean Follain. His principal collections of poetry include Terraque (1942), Executoire (1947), Gagner (1949), Carnac (1961), Sphere (1963, Avec (1966), and Euclidiennes (1967), from which Levertov's selections are drawn; Ville (1969), Paroi (1970), Inclus (1973), and Du Domaine (1977) all appear later. Guillevic is not, in any traditional way, an especially difficult poet, as is for example his contemporary Rene Char (they were born in the same year); nor for that matter is he as good a poet as Char, at least in terms of interrogating language. During the occupation Guillevic joined the Communist Party, and a fair portion of his poetry is of a directly political nature. Chiefly, however, he has been regarded as a poet of and often as a poet who can illuminate nature's darker tones. What seems to impress Levertov--and what no doubt leads her into the translation of Guillevic, with the implicit support and insight such translation could lend to her own writing--is the promise of vision. In Voir (To See, GSP 6) Guillevic writes: Il s'agit de voir Tellement plus clair, De faire avec les choses Comme la lumiere. Levertov renders this quite literally: It's a question of seeing so much clearer, of doing to things what light does to them. (GSP 7) Compare this to section S of Relearning the Alphabet (RA 118), the poem which I take to be the finest of Levertov's career: I turn in the forest. …