Collected Prose

the object being examined did not exist as a word. The primary act of the poet, therefore, becomes the act of seeing, as if no one had ever seen the thing before, so that the object might have “the good fortune to be born into words.”
    Like Ponge, who has frequently resisted the efforts of critics to classify him as a poet, Michaux is a writer whose work escapes the strictures of genre. Floating freely between prose and verse, his texts have a spontaneous, almost haphazard quality that sets them against the pretensions and platitudes of high art. No French writer has ever given greater rein to the play of his imagination. Much of his best writing is set in imaginary countries and reads as a bizarre kind of anthropology of inner states. Although often compared to Kafka, Michaux does not resemble the author of Kafka’s novels and stories so much as the Kafka of the notebooks and parables. As with Artaud, there is an urgency of process in Michaux’s writing, a sense of personal risk and necessity in the act of composition. In an early statement about his poetry he declared: “I write with transport and for myself. a) sometimes to liberate myself from an intolerable tension or from a no less painful abandonment. b) sometimes for an imaginary companion, for a kind of alter ego whom I would honestly like to keep up-to-date on an extraordinary transition in me or in the world, which I, ordinarily forgetful, all at once believe I rediscover in, so to speak, its virginity. c) deliberately to shake the congealed and established, to invent … Readers trouble me. I write, if you like, for the unknown reader.”
    An equal independence of approach is present in Daumal, a serious student of Eastern religions, whose poems deal obsessively with the rift between spiritual and physical life. “The Absurd is the purest and most basic form of metaphysical existence,” he wrote, and in his dense, visionary work, the illusions of appearance fall away only to be transformed into further illusions. “The poems are haunted by a … consciousness of impending death,” Michael Benedikt has commented, “seen as the poet’s long-lost ‘double’; and also by a personification of death as a sort of sinister mother, an exacting being avaricious in her search for beings to extinguish — but only so as to place upon them perversely the burden of further metamorphoses.”
    Daumal is considered one of the chief precursors of the “College of Pataphysics,” a mock-secret literary organization inspired by Alfred Jarry that included both Queneau and Prévert among its members. Humor is the guiding principle in the work of these two poets. With Queneau, it is a linguistic humor, based on intricate word plays, parody, feigned stupidity and slang. In his well-known prose work of 1947, for example, Exercices de style , the same mundane event is given in ninety-nine different versions, each one written in a different style, each one presented from a different point of view. In discussing Queneau in Writing Degree Zero , Roland Barthes describes this style as “white writing” — in which literature, for the first time, has openly become a problem and question of language. If Queneau is an intellectual poet, Prévert, who also adheres closely to the patterns of ordinary speech in his work, is without question a popular poet — even a populist poet. Since World War II, no one has had a wider audience in France, and many of Prévert’s works have been turned into highly successful songs. Anticlerical, antimilitaristic, rebellious in political attitude and extolling a rather sentimentalized form of love between man and woman, Prévert represents one of the more felicitous marriages between poetry and mass culture, and beyond the charm of his work, it is valuable as an indicator of popular French taste.
    Although Surrealism continues to exist as a literary movement, the period of its greatest influence and most important creations came to an end by the beginning of World War II. Of the second-generation Surrealists — or those poets who found inspiration in its methods — Césaire stands out as the most notable example. One of the first black writers to be recognized in France, founder of the négritude movement — which asserts the uniqueness and dignity of black culture and consciousness — Césaire, a native of Martinique, was championed by Breton, who discovered his work in the late thirties. As the South African poet Mazisi Kunene