A poet long unread, Ponge has come into his own since the 1950s with admirers from Sartre to Sollers. Sartre considered him the poet of existentialism. Yet Ponge's poetry is concerned with the priority of objectivity, with things as they exist apart from people. This objectivity has attracted him to writers of the new novel and to the group of semiotic critics centered on the literary review Tel Quel. Among his major collections are Le Parti Pris des Choses (The Voice of Things, 1942), Le Grand Recueil (The Big Collection, 1961), and Le Savon (Soap, 1967).
C. K. Williams is the author of eight books of poems, the most recent of which, "Repair", won the Pulitzer Prize & the "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize. He teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University & lives part of the year in Paris.