Collection: Francis Ponge

Francis Ponge (1899–1988) was both a giant of French twentieth-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 inhabit our lives and share our existence. He did not so much reinvent the shell, cigarette, soap, pebble, sun, oyster, or the asparagus, as forge and share with them a new language.