ABSTRACT
Francis Ponge is considered to be the preeminent French "poet of things," yet the truth of this attribution should be qualified. It is true that he devotes poems, prose poems, and prose texts to magnolia trees, carnations, oysters, snails, shrimp, olives, potatoes, shutters, dinner plates, laundry boilers, and many other objects. Ponge's last books thus comprise not only the final versions of short prose texts but also the tentative drafts, notes, second guesses, and successive variants leading up to them. French poets are regularly accused of abstruseness, but many have followed Ponge in their desire to break through tenacious concepts and, by this act, to catch sight of unexpected down-to-earth realities. The Protestant-raised Ponge eventually realized that his own brand of literary iconoclasm had left him with an immitigable materialism. He once movingly defined his work, in reference to Boethius, as a Consolation matérialiste.
