Nioque of the Early-Spring

Francis Ponge (trans. Jonathan Larson)

Ostensibly a book written to honor the season itself and the cycle of time, upon its release in France in May 1968, these notes took on a greater metaphorical meaning within this context, addressing the need for new beginnings and revolution.

'April is not always the cruelest month. In these stray notations dated early April 1950, Ponge provides a latter-day version of Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps or of William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All—a vernal enactment of all the resurrectional energies of a springtime-to-come, as witnessed firsthand at the farmhouse of “La Fleurie” in southern France. When subsequently published in Tel Quel in May 1968, eighteen years later, Ponge’s rural, pastoral text now acquired a specific urban history and Utopianism, its Lucretian “Nioque,” or gnosis, now speaking to the gnomic revolutionary slogans of the Left Bank barricades: “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” “Beneath the cobblestones, the beach.” Jonathan Larson’s careful engagement with Ponge manages to seize what is most prosaic about his poetry—its fierce communism of the ordinary, its insistence that taking the part of things means taking words at their most etymological everydayness.' - Richard Sieburth