Francis Ponge: De la connaissance en poesie (review)

Lévy, Sydney. Francis Ponge: De la connaissance en poésie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1999. Pp. 141. ISBN 2-84292-057-0. 130 F.

The working hypothesis of Sydney Lévy’s Ponge is that poetry may help us come to know the world of phenomena, and that it may in some cases articulate that knowledge in a manner that might be called “scientific.” This is a notion that will confound many readers of contemporary poetry–though it would surely have seemed utterly apt to Lucretius. Lévy is interested in the ways in which Ponge attempts to reduce the distance between experience and its representation, elaborating a textuality that does not offer a mere account of experience, but rather strives to produce experience through an experimental poetics. Reading Ponge’s oeuvre as a synchronous whole, Lévy sees therein a profile of what he terms “une théorie de la connaissance plus ou moins explicite” (14).