When Ponge began to write, the question of how to salute beauty was hardly a problem, and right after a world war, the proposition that poetry should be written by everyone appeared to be a mockery. And what of the descent into the depths of consciousness that Apollinaire predicted and which turned out to be the road taken by the best of his contemporaries? Ponge's despair, however, was too skeptical to submit to the belief that language could bring into the light of day the messages of the subconscious in a pure form. If poetry was still possible at all, then only as an "art of resistance against the word."…

In order to achieve affirmation, creative nihilism operates through negation of that which is established. Applied to language, this means repairing the regular abuse of words with resolute incorrectness, that incorrectness which appears as a program in Ponge's...