In Defense of the Prose Poem, or The Existential Escargot

Every time I teach Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium, I buy another book he references in them. It’s like getting a reading list from a trusted source. Usually it’s another treasure I don’t know how else I would have stumbled across. Once, I admit, I didn’t see what he saw—I put down Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual after reading about half of it. But I’ve chased down others of his works and enjoyed them, so I still count him as a triumph.

One of my favorite discoveries was Francis Ponge. Ponge writes prose poems, which I adore. I’ve had many conversations defending this delicate art.  Ponge’s The Nature of Things (Le parti pris des choses) features in Calvino’s essay on “Exactitude” because Ponge is a master of exactitude. In the quest for “le mot juste,” he takes all the prizes. He describes objects and incidents with laser precision. I read one or two occasionally when I need a shot of beauty, like an inoculation against the dis-ease of the world.

In The Nature of Things, “Snails” is by far the longest piece--over four pages. It is quite striking throughout, but the end compels me to write (but first to quote).  He calls snails “saints.”

“That is the example that snails offer us: saints who make masterpieces of their lives, works of art of their own perfection. They secrete form. Nothing outside themselves, their necessity, or their needs is their work. Nothing is out of proportion with their physical being. Nothing that is unnecessary or obligatory.

“And so they delineate the duties of humanity: great thoughts come from the heart. Live a better life and make better verses. Morality and rhetoric combine in the ambition and desire of the wise.

“How are they saints? Precisely by obedience to their nature. So: know yourself. And accept yourself for what you are. In agreement with your vices. In proportion with your measure.

“What is most appropriate to the human being? Words. Decency. Our humanism.”

And he wrote this in Paris in 1936. So 350 years after Polonius told Laertes “To thine own self, be true” and 70 years before a rash of self-help books and articles in women’s magazines, here was some crazy Frenchman watching snails in his garden and thinking ‘Hey, we’re a lot alike!’ What a cool world we live in when meaningful connections can be made between such disparate entities, when patterns in the nature of things echo, or reverberate, or like images in a mirror, respond to each other.  The longer I live, the more I feel everything is connected.

And the advice is so beautiful:  Know yourself. Accept yourself. 1- in keeping with your vices, and 2- in proportion to your stature. So look honestly at yourself. Learn your weaknesses. He doesn’t say to stamp them out; just learn them. And understand your stature. I take that to mean we should acknowledge how we stand tall (our strengths, etc.) and how high we stand—to realize our position in relation to other things and people. Find your place. Plomb your depths and measure your heights. Then express yourself—all with a mind to perfecting yourself. At 17 I told a friend I was questing to create the perfect Alison, and he very gallantly asked me not to because he liked the current version fine. But who could ever stop? The point Ponge makes is that we must do it consciously every step of the way.

Discover our nature and live it. Well. Really well. Good luck out there.

(The Ponge text is taken from Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau's translation, available on the Poetry Foundation website:  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/89712/snails. The photo is of a little girl running toward self-actualization, faster than a snail or a stopped train.)

Text and Image, the “What Do You See When You Read?” edition

I had the most wonderful conversation in my Senior Symposium today.  Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium always intimidates students, but always precipitates the most animated and thoughtful discussions.  We were talking about his plea for visibility in texts. 

I always take this occasion to ask students how they think.  I ask them to think of something—a cloud, say, or a dragon—and then I ask them if, in their heads, they saw images or words. (Or if I asked for coffee, would they see the plant, the word, or the word spelled out in beans?) Do they think, in short, in images or words?  Today’s tally was six wordy folk and 30 picture people. Over the last decade, my students have become decidedly more visual in their thinking.

The implications of that sent us reeling.  First, I discovered many of them write creatively, and when they do, some see mental movies, and then composition is just describing what they saw in their heads.  Calvino admits to starting with an image for three of his novels, but doesn’t claim it for all his works.  It begs the question, where do those images or movies come from that they see in their minds and try to convey.  Mostly they feel like they are spawned by their personal experiences and stories they know. They don’t believe as much in inspiration, but in compilation. 

Calvino worried (I find it adorable) in 1985, that we were becoming overwhelmed with images—that we see so many images, we are saturated, and he frets about people in the 21^st century being able to make original images.  I think he needn’t have worried.  It has only gotten worse (if you think image-saturation is a bad thing), and we have continued to create more and more.  In fact, visual texts are increasingly popular, and there is no sign of slowing down. In an era of memes, graphic novels, television, and film, the visual arts are still thriving, although perhaps in a more self-consciously derivative way. 

Ultimately, I don’t think his fear was founded.  Just as stories can be told and retold, images can be made and remade, and just as for centuries we’ve been bemoaning the fact that no one can read everything in print, now no one can see everything either.  (I can’t even be counted on to watch a television show regularly).  That means there will always be the possibility of finding something new to you.

Perhaps the most delightful discovery we made today was the variety of ways in which different people can think and read.  One confessed she doesn’t see images as she reads; she goes from words on the page to words in her mind and only at the end takes a moment to conjure an image of what happened.  One associates feelings with colors, so reads as if through rose or crimson or charcoal colored glasses. One said ideas and stories come to him in static images, and he has to write them down to be free of them (as good a student of Calvino as there ever was).  I see words in my head as people talk to me and am constantly shifting parts of words to figure out roots and etymologies, but I have a hard time holding images in my head, and I can’t manipulate them (I am an English major, not an engineer.)  But having this discussion opened all our minds a little, just to know the sheer range of ways to process words and images.

There is much work to be done in cognitive science in terms of imagining and reading, if my class is any indicator.  Meanwhile, Calvino’s fear of over-saturation was borne out when wordy people claimed they remember distinctive images and visual people remember slogans and words more readily, as they stand out against the flood of images.  The upshot is that we all move pretty fluidly from text to image and back again.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but one word can trigger countless images too.