Rhetoric (Rhétorique)

Francis Ponge

Rhetoric (Rhétorique)
 

I imagine it’s about rescuing a few young men from suicide

And a few others from being policemen or firemen.

I think of those who commit suicide from disgust, because

They find ‘the others’ own too large a share of them.

One could say to them: at least grant the word to the minority

Within you. Be poets. They’ll reply: but it’s then, always then

I sense the others within me, when I seek to express myself and can’t.

Words are all pre-made and express themselves: they never

Express me. Then, once more, I am stifled.

That’s when revealing the art of resisting words is useful, the art

Of only saying what one wishes to say, the art of doing them violence

Forcing them to submit. In short to create a rhetoric, or rather teach

Each the art of creating their own rhetoric, is a visible act of salvation.

It saves those few, those rare individuals who ought to be saved: those

Who show awareness and concern and disgust for the others inside them.

Those who can advance the human spirit

And, literally speaking, change the face of things.

Ripe Blackberries (Les Mûres)
 

On the typographic bushes constituted by the poem beside a road

That neither leads beyond things nor to the spirit,

Certain fruits are formed of an agglomeration of spheres

Each one filled with a drop of ink.

Black, red and brown, together on the bunch, they seem to offer

The spectacle of a family swollen with pride at various ages

Rather than a keen temptation to go collecting.

Given the disproportion of pips to fruit birds value them little

So little remains in the end for them

When the traverse is made from beak to anus.

Yet the poet in the course of his professional excursion

Extracts from them the seeds of meaning: ‘So then,’ says he,

‘The patient efforts of a quite fragile flower in extensive numbers

Succeed while protected by a rebarbative tangle of briars.

Lacking many other qualities – ripe blackberries they are, perfectly ripe –

Just as this poem is complete.’