Formules de la poesie: Etudes sur Ponge, Leiris, Char et Du Bouchet (review)

Philippe Met’s study begins with an important insight into twentieth-century poetry: namely, that many post-surrealist French poets did not compose works around images but instead around what Michel Leiris called “axioms” and “definitions.” Francis Ponge termed “proverbs” and René Char called “fragments,” what Met groups under the generic name “formulae.” A hybrid genre, formulae cut across distinctions between verse and prose, finished works and texts made up of several incomplete versions, or between descriptive works and meditations on writing. As a way of inferring some order from this wide array of texts, Met chose the writings of four poets, which, in different ways, illustrate two claims. The first is that modern poetic formulae reverberate between two extremes – the pole of lapidary pronouncements (which imitate the fixity of age-old sayings) and the pole of idealized, ever-shifting art-objects, to which the incomplete fragments of a Ponge dossier or a Leirisian glossary sometimes point. The second is that, according to the writers examined, poetry is not only an exercise that produces formulae, it is also one in which the formulae produced define what is poetic in contemporary writing. [End Page 125]