Issue 8

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Poetry

The Blackberries
by Francis Ponge

On the typographic bushes of the poem down a road leading neither out of things nor to the mind, certain fruits are composed of an agglomeration of spheres plumped with a drop of ink.

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Black, rose, and khaki together on the bunch, they are more like the sight of a rogue family at its different ages than a strong temptation to picking.

In view of the disproportion of seeds to pulp, birds don't think much of them, so little remains once from beak to anus they’ve been traversed.

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But the poet in the course of his professional promenade takes the seed to task: “So,” he tells himself, “the patient efforts of a fragile flower on a rebarbative tangle of brambles are by and large successful. Without much else to recommend them—ripe, indeed they are ripe—done, like my poem.”

Francis Ponge was born in Montpellier, France in 1899. He is the author of several collections of poems, including Le parti pris des choses (The Voice of Things) and was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1974.

Beverly Bie Brahic is the author of Against Gravity (Worple Press). An Unfinished Ode to Mud, her selection of Ponge’s prose poems, was published by CBEditions (London).

Read more in Issue 8

Fiction Li Ling by Atsushi Nakajima
After the Wreck: Naomi J. Williams on Historical Fictions and Fictional Histories
Source Material:
Sara Majka Considers Booking a Room
Powers of Recuperation by Adrienne Rich
Trans-Neptunian Object by Suzanne Buffam
The Blackberries by Francis Ponge
The Mupandawana Dancing Champion by Petina Gappah