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mattdube's review
4.0
I read a couple of Ponge's poems online and was struck pretty forcefully that reading him in that format doesn't really work, because the poems are just too dense to really sit with them online, at least if you're me and can only rest your eyes in one place for a second or so before you have to skim forward. So I got this book, which really delivered on the promise of those tight, gnomic paragraphs I saw online.
This collection is in two sections, "Siding with Things" and "Pieces," and I think I preferred the work in "Siding," for the way it felt more focused, more impacted and mysteriously dense. There's a level of cerebral jumpiness and wit that crops up in poems like "The Cigarette," The Crate" and "The Trees Decompose in a Sphere of Fog" that I haven't seen anywhere else, that I take as being the distinguishing mark of Ponge's work.
I like a lot of the work in "Pieces," too, but some poems, especially the longer works, like the two Spider poems, I feel like I've seen elsewhere, in Romantic work like poems by Shelley, Whitman, and even O'Hara. I don't think there's anything wrong with these poems, and I'd certainly lean on them if I was teaching a selection of Ponge because they are lucid and explicit about the goals of these poems. But I feel, too, that they are in their form and their movements, their inclusions and exclusions, less particular, peculiar, and distinct. It feels like a handful of poets could've written them.
Still, a great collection, and one I found deeply rewarding and that I hope to come back to again.
This collection is in two sections, "Siding with Things" and "Pieces," and I think I preferred the work in "Siding," for the way it felt more focused, more impacted and mysteriously dense. There's a level of cerebral jumpiness and wit that crops up in poems like "The Cigarette," The Crate" and "The Trees Decompose in a Sphere of Fog" that I haven't seen anywhere else, that I take as being the distinguishing mark of Ponge's work.
I like a lot of the work in "Pieces," too, but some poems, especially the longer works, like the two Spider poems, I feel like I've seen elsewhere, in Romantic work like poems by Shelley, Whitman, and even O'Hara. I don't think there's anything wrong with these poems, and I'd certainly lean on them if I was teaching a selection of Ponge because they are lucid and explicit about the goals of these poems. But I feel, too, that they are in their form and their movements, their inclusions and exclusions, less particular, peculiar, and distinct. It feels like a handful of poets could've written them.
Still, a great collection, and one I found deeply rewarding and that I hope to come back to again.
sloatsj's review
5.0
Pure. Gorgeous. Prose poems about ordinary things that make them deeply, intimately, intricately interesting.
thechristine's review
5.0
Everyone should read this book immediately
This is a book of prose poetry that far exceeded all my expectations and it is a book that made me think about everything around me very excitedly
Some of the translations are a little bit out of control but ultimately it's fine
This is a book of prose poetry that far exceeded all my expectations and it is a book that made me think about everything around me very excitedly
Some of the translations are a little bit out of control but ultimately it's fine
heypretty52's review
4.0
Read the poem in which ripe berries are an analogy for creative inspiration... it'll blow your mind.