by: Samantha Lê

A poet must maintain a healthy distrust of abstract language and concepts. Abstractions don’t know the direct route to the heart. They circle around themselves like mazes without answers. If I were to write about war, I’d have no concrete way of putting my arms around the entire subject. It’s too big and is made murky by other abstract ideas about what it means to be human, which is a profound and important question but not one that can be answered inside one poem. The subject of war, in its entirety, is better left to historians to decipher; historians have more words (but the poets, we have all the good ones).

Instead of talking about war, I might observe the life cycle of a flowering weed in No Man’s Land. Down in the trenches between two opposing armies, what traumas does this weed experience and witness throughout the seasons of its short life? Are the flowers that blossom from its existence not as beautiful as the ones in an open field? Is life still worthwhile and precious even in the darkest of moments? And if my words are simple and right, perhaps this poem would find its way to some truth about human violence and sufferings, a truth that, had I started with the abstract concept of war, I wouldn’t have been able to reach.

Writing on the subject of abstractions, Francis Ponge wrote:

“Ideas are not my forte. I don’t manipulate them easily. Instead they manipulate me. Give me a sort of queasiness or nausea. I don’t really like to be thrown among them.”

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Notes on Francis Ponge, French poet (1899-1988)

For those interested in exploring more of Ponge’s work, I recommend starting with Francis Ponge Selected Poems, a collection of prose poems dedicated to the language of everyday things, such as: decomposed trees, snails and a shellfish (my favorite). Inside the world that these poems create, simple things are made bigger and all-encompassing. They provide insights into how we view the world. It is a masterclass in the curation of metaphors and the revival of language.

Francis Ponge Selected Poems was edited by Margaret Guiton, French poet (1922-2018) and translated by Charles Kenneth “C. K.” Williams, American poet (1936-2015) and John Montague, Irish poet (1929-2016). Note: It’s worthwhile to explore these writers’ other works.