Francis Ponge (1899-1988) spent his early years in Avignon. He attended school in Caen, later studied both law and Philosophy before taking up a variety of editorial and teaching jobs. Le parti pris des choses (The Nature of Things, Gallimard, 1942), caught the attention of prominent writers and artists. Wider recognition came in the sixties when Gallimard published several large collections of his poetry and essays, among them Nioque de l’Avant-Printemps, the collection from which these translated excerpts come. Ponge describes his approach to writing in The Making of the Pré as “things are already as much as words as things and…words…are as much things as words. It is their copulation that writing realizes.”