Vanessa Hernandez

10 November 2010

Intro Writing/Lit

I thought I had been cursed with eyes that loved to read poetry but a mind that could not fully understand it. Time and time again I would try to decipher these hieroglyphs and end up with nothing. It wasn’t until I read about Russell Edson that I realized a lot of writers don’t intend for their work to have one strict message, but many.

Instead of writing to depict a thoroughly planned moral, Edson writes for pleasure. He wanted, “…a poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fiction.” (32) I could relate to his purpose for writing and thus his work because creative writing should be an organic process..

I feel that what Olson, Edson, Coolidge, and so many other writers are trying to say, is to let one’s writing bloom into its own piece without giving it a limited direction. “You wrote from what you didn’t know toward whatever could be picked up in the act.” (369) Their purpose was to allow let their creative minds to take their writing wherever it wanted, instead of setting out with a structured plan.

By allowing the reader to interpreted his work, I relaxed while reading “Conjugal” and found myself enjoying its eerie and whimsical charm. The poem begins with the blunt line, “A man is bending his wife.” The first line simply implies that the man holds the power in the relationship. However, the following line cracks this statement, “He is bending her around something that she had bent herself around. She is around it, bent as he has bent her.” Here Edson tells the reader that the power the man has over his wife is simply an illusion, for she already has herself bent in the ways he bends.

This “illusion of power” concept filters itself through the poem by Edson’s use of simile in the fourth stanza. “It is as if he teaches her to swim. As if he teaches acrobatics. As if he could form her into something wet that he delivers out of one life into another.” (323) The use of simile with the “as if” symbolizes the man’s understanding of his wife. He indeed feels “as if” he controls her but in reality she owns the situation with her silence. The wife’s silence in the poem enhances her authority because it looms over the poem while the man’s mind tries to convince him otherwise.

By the end of the poem, the man flattens his wife into the flowered wallpaper. This may appear that he holds the control but soon after he smoothes her into the paper, he searches for her. “He is finding her nipples there. And he is kissing her pubis there.” The fact that the man is searching for the woman’s nipple just after he molded her into the wall reminds me of a infant and its dependency on a mother’s nipple for comfort and growth. I took the poem as showing the issues often present in relationships; the need for one to possess dominance over the other. This need for power often is visible in the male figure, but not necessarily there. Any man ,after all, came from the womb of a woman and I feel as if the mental connection between the child and its mother holds a power beyond the physical.

This however does not mean that the husband does not try and loom over his wife. The last stanza in the poem states so by saying, “He climbs into the wallpaper among the flowers. And his buttocks move in and out of the wall.” The man seems as if he has control by having sex with his wife but in reality he is under a spell; one where he cannot simply turn his wife into an object because he needs her comfort mentally and sexually.

All together, human try to pull specks of meaning from everything, like monkeys with lice. We shouldn’t try and only look for what the writer was trying to say because often, they write for writing. I enjoyed this experience a lot though it wasn’t easy at all.