STILL FIRES

“No straight thing has ever been made out of the crooked timber of humanity.” – Kant.

“Surely we did not need this (to see an inscrutable sky so clearly) to consider God a base invention, a vile insinuation, an impolite proposition, an attempt-alas, successful-at overwhelming human consciences: those who persuade us otherwise are traitors or impostors.

Elsewhere, nature longs for skies busy with other things, carting clouds, for example. Here, the skies are clearly busy with suffocating nature. Here, it is clear that nature is suffocating. It remains cloistered beneath an inscrutable sky, tries pathetically to live. Urns, statues become its interpreters, its supplicants. But there is no answer: it's splendid.” – Francis Ponge, ‘La Rage de L’Expression’, Paris Review.

Ponge's is to attempt to scoop the particular from its nest as the abstract abstraction: to realise the ultimate evolution of the poet: render the Thing unto itself. Ponge's is a peculiar talent in his ability to deadbolt his words to the thing he’s describing: the words become the invisible-thin ‘filter’ through which we absorb the subject: attached like a dot-to-dot map, taking on the textures, feelings, smells, flavours, colours, everything of the things he writes about so that by the end Francis has written a still fire into life.

To wipe away the scrim of reality-as-thought (thought-as-substrate) to be able to knuckle into emotive shape the real underneath is Francis’ special talent. And we’re left with the beautiful thoughts and emotions evoked by heroic molluscs clinging to their stone-shelf, like Ponge’s words to their creators.

"Dear Lorca, I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut and squeeze-a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could suddenly be covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem, a moon utterly independent of images." - Jack Spicer, After Lorca