The Pine Woods Notebook

After the defeat of the French army and the German occupation, Francis Ponge set out, travelling by foot and bicycle, to reach the Free Zone.  It was a month and a half before he reached a small village in the Haute-Loire and there, reunited with his family but with no access to books, he began writing in the only paper that was available to him.  Over the course of a month, this pocket notebook recorded his repeated attempts to express the essence of the landscape he now found himself in.  The pine woods, like this part of unoccupied France, were a shelter, 'where one can roam about at ease, without underbrush, without branches grazing the head, where one can stretch out on dry ground, not spongy, quite comfortably.  Each pine wood is like a natural sanatorium, also a music hall... a chamber, a vast cathedral for meditation (fortunately a cathedral without a pulpit) open to all winds, but through so many doors it's as though they were closed.  For winds hesitate before them.'

August 7th: The wood is like a room - 'A carpet prevails over it.  A few stray rocks supply furnishings' 

August 8th: The pine tree is mostly dead wood and 'flares up only at the very peak: something like a candle'

August 9th: The masts of the trees are 'crinkled, lichen-cloaked like an elderly Creole'

August 12th: Pine needles are like bristles, 'hard as the teeth of a comb.'

August 13th: 'These woods are of a type of structure that has a very high ceilinged ground floor and above that an extremely complicated framework of upper floors, ceiling and roof.'  

August 17th: Within the wood there is 'perfect dryness.  Assuring vibrations and musicality.  Something metallic.  The presence of insects.  Fragrance.'

August 20th: The pine is 'the elemental idea of a tree.  It is an I, a stalk, and the rest matters little.'

August 21st: The wood is like a hairdressing salon - 'aromatic brushery in an overheated atmosphere' and 'fragments of sky like shards of mirrors.'

August 22nd: It is a 'temple of caducity'

August 24th: 'Above all, it is a slow production of wood.'

As Ponge walked and wrote he assembled the elements for a poem with the tentative title 'Sunlight in the Pine Woods.'  But what he eventually published a decade later in La rage de l'expression (translated for Archipelago Books by Lee Fahnestock) was not this poem, or even the kind of short prose pieces that brought acclaim when Le parti pris des choses appeared in 1942, but the notebook entries themselves.  The observations quoted above are found among lists and dictionary definitions, rewritings, plans and half formed ideas ('would it be possible to disentangle a forest...?')  For Ponge poetry is always imperfect, but a reader of The Pine Woods Notebook can follow him into the trees and witness poetry in the making.

The Water Table

On Monday last week I went to see Philip Gross reading from The Water Table and interviewed by Simon Armitage, one of the judges who awarded this book the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize.  They both noted that water has been a dominant element in recent recipients of this award - in 2007 it went to Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book, which has been described as 'a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart', another T. S. Eliot Prize winner in 2002. The Water Table is inspired by the Severn Estuary, a place of 'stillness and energy' known on one shore as the Bristol Channel and on the other as Môr Hafren (the Severn Sea).  Poems like 'Sluice Angel', 'Bridge Passages' and 'Severn Song' describe the rivers shifting channels, the continual flux of water and mud, the forty-foot tide of 'liquid solid as rock' the gulls converging out to sea.  Ten poems called 'Betweenland' look at the water in different ways - as a mouth debouching our secrets, as an ear amplifying distance, as a mind constantly changing and, at sunset, a place for 'the draining down of daylight, westwards and out of the world.'  

Gross has said that a poem is "a piece of extraordinary attention" and last week he talked of the importance of looking for a long time at something until it yields a poem.  This reminded me of Merleau-Ponty's description of Cézanne, studying his motif, which I mentioned here before in connection with Charles Tomlinson (a poet Philip Gross sometimes resembles).  I thought it would sound too pretentious at a poetry reading to ask Philip Gross about phenomenology or Merleau-Ponty, so I cannot say whether there is a direct connection.  Perhaps a general one though - in the New York Review recently the poet Durs Grünbein was quoted as saying that artists are "an army of phenomenologists working on expanding the confines of our shared imaginaries."  When I read Philip Gross's meditations on the action of water (like his poem 'Pour') I thought of those short phenomenological prose poems in which Francis Ponge conveyed the 'voices of things' (writing that led him to be described by Italo Calvino as 'the Lucretius of our time').  In C. K. Williams' translation, one of Ponge's poems begins: 'The rain I watch fall in the courtyard comes down at quite varying tempos. In the centre it's a fine discontinuous curtain (or net), an implacable but relatively slow downfall of fairly light drops, a lethargic, everlasting precipitation, a concentrated fragment of the atmosphere. Near the left and right walls, heavier, individual drops fall more noisily. Here they seem the size of a grain of wheat, there of a pea, elsewhere almost of a marble...'  And so it goes on, until the description reaches a natural conclusion, the sun comes out and 'all soon vanishes...'

Towards the end of the evening Simon Armitage asked in jest if Gross did "requests" and, if so, whether he would read the poem 'Globe', in which a whole world is reflected in the sphere of a newel post.  Gross politely declined to take him up on this, but if we had been encouraged to call out for our favourites in some raucous display of appreciation I would have shouted "Designs for the Water Garden!"  It describes a set of imaginary gardens that would appeal I think to Gardenhistorygirl and readers of BLDGBLOG and Pruned. The first features a set of glass stepping stones that allow one to walk on water 'when a low mist frosts the lake'.  The second is a 'rain-gazebo' in which rain is deliberately allowed to fall through a ceiling well and into a floor grille, 'passing through, a slim visitor'.  The third involves a salmon treadwheel, the fourth a mist maze, the fifth a 'slow gusher' of eels, pouring across the lawn.  The sixth, a 'flood-feature', requires us to contemplate the aftermath of a 'the water-beast dragging its bulk through the garden' and the seventh, most magical of all, imagines a 'water-glass lens through which you can see only water' revealing ourselves to be 'lattices of mostly water, flowing side by side.'