Response 8

by Alora Young

'The Toy-Maker'

Poetry has always been really hard for me to get into. Generally speaking, I don’t read it, because my inability to understand a single line just makes me feel like an idiot. And no one wants to feel like an idiot. Since I don’t read poetry, I rarely write it either – because, of course, you’ve got to know how to read something before you can write it, and I still don’t have a great idea of how to read poetry. After this week’s class, however, I do have a better idea.

I liked Russell Edson’s work from the first because it was prose poetry, and even if I didn’t understand the meaning behind it, I understood the structural aspects of grammar and paragraphing, which made me feel a little better about myself. It’s also pretty obvious reading his poems that he works in metaphors and surrealism, and the lesson on connotative vs. denotative in this week’s class helped me to realise that his metaphors could have a million different meanings depending not only on the reader’s associations, but on Edson’s own associations as well. In class, we looked at ‘Conjugal’, but my favourite poem of his was ‘The Toy-Maker’.

It seems to me that the “toy-maker” is a metaphor for mankind and societal expectations: “A toy-maker made a toy wife and a toy child. He made a toy house and some toy years.” To me, this says, society expects us to get married, have children, buy a house, and live in this nuclear family for the rest of our lives. Society makes media that shows us this, and in the seventies, and even today, it was still hard to break free from these expectations. He develops this further with: “He made a getting-old toy, and he made a dying toy” – illustrating the inevitable end that every member of the human race will meet. This, however, he follows with, “The toy-maker made a toy heaven and a toy god”, which brings into sight the ideas that society has developed to create an afterlife, and to explain the meaning of life, as in, we live to serve our chosen god and abstain from sin in order to live an eternal afterlife in heaven. “But, best of all,” Edson closes this poem, “he liked making toy shit.”

This final line is, if the slightly condescending tone of the rest of the poem didn’t make it seem that way enough already, what convinces me that this is a criticism on society and how meaningless and uniform human life has become, or perhaps has always been. We have, I guess, always married, had children, lived in some form of shelter, worshiped a god, grown old, died, and left those still alive to believe we’ve gone to heaven. Most societies throughout history, it seems, have shared these generalised beliefs of ‘normality’, and so humans, “the toy-maker”s, continue to “mak[e] toy shit”.

The straightforward prose style of ‘The Toy-Maker’ and Edson’s other poetry made it really easily accessible for me. Even if I couldn’t quite decipher the meaning (like with ‘Ape’), I still got to really enjoy the surface humor. Understanding what the poem was about came to mean less than simply reading it for the sake of enjoyment, which I feel was Edson’s true intention – he wrote, it seems, for his own enjoyment, and managed to spread that enjoyment to us through his words.