A Portrait in Ellipses: Russell Edson, 1935–2014 [by Jennifer L. Knox]

A little pink rabbit’s munching on grass. Everything seems nearly normal, except for the fact that the rabbit’s pink. But it’s a pink you can live with—almost a coral if you want to get technical and who wants to do that? The rabbit’s pink, and that’s that. It raises its head to sniff the air. Suddenly it stands on its back legs and flashes a bright white set of shark teeth directly at you. You read somewhere that sharks have multiple sets of teeth, a secret set nesting behind the outside set, the teeth you can see, another secret set of teeth behind those…

Russell Edson has been called the Godfather of the American Prose Poem, but I don’t think that title fits. He did not create the form, nor was he the first to innoculate it with parables from the subconscious’ darkest regions. In his introduction to Great American Prose Poems, From Poe to the Present, David Lehman wrote, “It is a form that sets store by its use of the demotic, its willingness to locate the sources of poetry defiantly far from the spring on Mount Helicon sacred to the muses. It is an insistently modern form. Some would argue that it is, or was, an inherently subversive one”—hence, a form ideal in which to get your freak on, which Edson did in thirteen (stupidly difficult to find) books written from 1951-2009.

He also wrote two novels, six books of short stories and “fables,” and three books of plays—a logical extension of his dialogue-driven poetry. Donald Hall said, “Whatever his method of writing, (he) makes surreal poems. Few poets have ever written as Edson does, out of a whole irrational universe—infantile, paranoiac—with its own small curved space complete to itself, impenetrable by other conditions of thought.” That’s more like it: a Universe Maker—a universe of monkeys, boobs, and poop—not the Godfather nor a Champion of the form, as Edson shunned championing things. In a 2004 interview with Mark Tursi in Double Room, he said, “I don’t see poetry as editorial comment…what we can write is so much deeper and more interesting than the empty descriptions we give of ourselves” and of our writing, I’ll add. Most definitely, a Perfector—a topiary gardener, molding seething green clouds into shapes yet unknown...

Poet Ada Limón and I ran a reading series in Brooklyn for a few years at Pete’s Candy Store—now the home to Dorothea Lasky’s Multifarious Array series. Russell Edson was one of our first readers. The fact that he agreed to do so was a miracle, really. He and his lovely wife, Frances, had to travel by train from Connecticut—we could not cover the cost of their train tickets nor pay him for the reading. All we could offer him was a free sandwich. But he had just gotten over a bad cold and was excited to take a little trip. At Grand Central Station, we met them on the platform holding a sign like the limo drivers do that said MR. BRAIN—the title of one of his poems. He laughed and laughed. The crowd was sparse. He was a picture of meekness—slight, stooped, wearing a baby blue sweater—but in his deep, resonant voice, every sentence was a punch thrown hard that landed square in the face. Nose breakers, all. Russ was The Boss. The next day, my stomach muscles ached from laughing, but part of me worried: did they make it home OK on the train…

I’ve found that students are more freaked out by Edson’s poems than those of any other poet. “What the fuck was that?!” They understand all the words and straight-forward syntax. They make it all the way to the end, hand in hand with the author, but that never makes that last sentence more predictable, or less scary. The flinch—like looking down and finding a spider on your arm as big as a fist-sized hair clog…

My favorite metaphor for a prose poem: a crowd of cheering people are gathered on a dock around an ocean liner. “Bon voyage! Au revoir!” they cheer and the women wave their little hankies. The gangway’s wheeled aside, the ship groans its “huuuhorrr” and slowly pulls away from the dock. The hankies wave faster, more cheers, the ship pulls away farther, and farther until its flags nearly disappear…then slowly it turns back around and pulls up to the dock. The crowd watches in silence. The expressions of the passengers as they stagger back down the gangway…

Edson defined his prose poems as “a statement that seeks sanity whilst its author teeters on the edge of the abyss.” There used to be a web page that I can no longer find about artists and mental illness with famous names listed under each medium—painters, composers, photographers. The poets list had the most names under it, which made poets the most mentally ill of all artists, according to the list makers. Russell Edson was on the poet’s list—the most obscure name, I thought—along side Big Boys like Lord Byron who kept a pet bear in his dorm room at Cambridge (which I never thought made him that crazy, but then again, I’m a poet). I wondered how the list makers had even heard of Russell Edson. Was Edson that well-known as a poet? As a crazy poet? As a crazy person? A bonafied craypoelebrity? A friend once told me he had studied with Edson at New Hampshire. When the weather was good, Edson held all his student conferences on the roof of the English building. Conferences were spent looking for dogs on the campus grounds below. “There’s one…there’s one…”

From Tursi’s interview: “All other arts have a physical presence which writing has always to earn. Poetry, which, paradoxically, is not really a language art as we know fiction to be, is perhaps, as you suggest, more related to painting. But even more, perhaps silent film, because dreams, if not completely, are mainly wordless. The babyish subconscious doesn't know how to speak. It is the land of physical understandings. Its language is a language of images. Poetry is a physical art without a physical presence...”

Edson was also a visual artist. He attended the Art Students League as a teenager; his figurative drawings and woodcuts appear throughout his work and on his book covers (above, from The Brain Kitchen: Writings and Woodcuts, 1965). The subjects in his portraits are exaggerated, misshapen, and isolated. They make me sad, and when the figures are surrounded by bright colors, they make me even sadder. Russell’s father was cartoonist Gus Edson, most famous for The Gumps series (left). At one point, Gus’ apprentice was a young Martin Landau—only seven years older than Russell. They probably hung out. I wonder if Russell ever saw Martin as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood. I can see him liking Ed Wood. Looking at those old comics, it makes perfect sense to me that Russell Edson’s poems all take place in tight boxes: stock, early twentieth century working class settings, surrounded by stock, early twentieth century working class nouns, populated by stock, early twentieth century working class characters (David Lehman wrote in the GAPP introduction that the prose poem’s “working class discourse’ undermines the lyric structures of the upper bourgeoisie)—all of which were straight out of The Gumps: barbers, horses, roosters, stethoscopes, eggs, pipes, alarm clocks, bathtubs, turkeys, mirrors, rabbits, disinfectant, butchers, bread, blood, big butts…

As a student, every professor told me that I should read Russell Edson. Then I did. I didn’t care for it. Rereading it now, I know why: I wasn’t afraid of death then, of all the animals inside me…

After he read for our series, I sent him my manuscript in hopes of securing his blurbment. He turned me down with a Very Nice Letter. A year later, I saw him read in the east village at the Between A & B series. “You’re no doubt very upset with me for not writing about your…thingy,” he said to me afterwards sheepishly, avoiding eye contact. I could not believe he remembered me, or remembered turning me down—I never remembered anything. I felt terrible for not having thanked him for turning me down. What a genuinely lovely man…

From Tursi’s interview: “It is an intuitive journey that takes us through the killing of a parakeet with an ax, and the thinking of shrinking something out of existence, and registering pigeons at a hotel, and a dog stuck to the ceiling by its back, not to mention a room overgrown with grass…But these are only stations of the journey. I'm not sure the journey has a psychological end; it probably has only a mortal end.”

Comments

[DL]

Edson was a wonderful guest at a New School poetry forum back in 2005 or '06, if memory serves: he was cheerfully irreverent and at dinner he and I tried to outdo one another in uttering deliberately incorrect statements with whatever degree of belief. Edson's influence on other practitioners of the prose poem was, as you point out, Jen, tremendous. Not to be underestimated is the way he has inspired a whole bunch of fiction writers (such as Lydia Davis) to accentuate the "short" in "short stories." Thanks for an excellent post, Jen.

[Jennifer L.]

Oh man, I wish I could've seen that!

[wally purgis]

JK, only poets should write about poets; or I should only read poets writing about poets. This is lovely; thank you.

[Franklin]

Very nice article, JK. I had a long-standing correspondence with Edson and composed an opera based on one of his plays. I lost touch with him over the last few years and was sad to hear of his passing. We tried for years to get a performance of 'Ketchup' but presenters thought it too weird. Fs.