Le Parti pris des choses is a collection of 32 short to medium-length prose poems by the French poet and essayist Francis Ponge.
It was at this time, in 1942, that he joined the French Resistance and also published what is considered his most famous work, Le parti pris des choses.
While he has only recently gained more popularity in the United States, he also spent the later part of his years lecturing across the country and also was a visiting professor at Barnard College and Columbia University.
Each of the works in the collection explores some object in the corporeal world, "borrowing the brevity and infallibility of the dictionary definition and the sensory aspect of the literary description".
[4] Lee Fahnestock, one of Le parti pris des choses’ translators, describes the work as "construct[ing] a new form of definition-description".
[5] The style shown in Le parti pris des choses was Ponge's first foray into what would become his definitive trademark.
[6] Much of Ponge's poetic style reflects his idea of the "objeu" (a portmanteau word combining objet (object/thing) and jeu (game)), or the "objective play of the mind".
[7] The objeu is the act of pointedly choosing language or subject matter for its double meanings, hidden connections, and sensory effects on the reader.
Indeed, where pure description is inadequate to truly capture the spirit of an object, Ponge employs auditory effects (e.g. assonance, sibilance, and paronomasia) as well as images that delight all the senses.
[10] However, though Ponge attempted to evoke the feeling of the object he was describing by any possible means, he simultaneously believed that good poems were "the most structured, the most uninvolved, the ‘coldest’ possible".
While Ponge's work is most often classified as prose poetry, he publicly rejected the moniker of "poet",[14] stating that he "uses poetic magma… only to get rid of it".
[15] While much commentary is focused on this, it appears from his writing style that Ponge's issue was more with the self-indulgent lyricism of some poets than with the concept of poetry itself.
The style of description and calculated subconscious evocation that Ponge established in his early writings starting with Le parti pris des choses was emulated by later French poets, notably Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, and André Du Bouchet, the first two of whom employ the "old master's" techniques of subtle wordplay.
"The Pebble", or "Le Galet", is easily the longest poem in the collection, being exceptionally long for the genre of prose poetry on the whole.
Translators of the collection or of parts of it include Lee Fahnestock, Robert Bly and Beth Archer Brombert.
She appreciates Ponge's "description-definition-literary art work" that avoids both the dullness of a dictionary and the inadequacy of poetic description.