Russell Edson

by Nathan Gale

(as far as i got)

Poetry often is condensed and confined by its structure, which makes the subject matter whether it be psychology or fantasy seem foreshortened and stark. Russell Edson over the last half-century developed a structure which frees poetry from certain restraints of style or scheme, using prose poems. Russell Edson lets the content of the poem, in his case often political phycology and sociology, create the structure itself. Psychology and sociology have a roll in his poetry as they help define characterize the way his poetry is constructed, often he uses absurd and surrealistic turns of event to bring forth meaning. Using anthropomorphic and fabulist situation in which nothing is based in reality, but like in a dream it is based on our understanding of how reality could become. Prose poetry lets Edson navigate through different sections of the subconscious using poetry to describe that subconscious travel of events which is often non-linear and based off of abstractions. The prose poem like a film is able to represent the abstract because it has no true linear value or boundaries, it can tell a story and still grant us a truly poetic experience. Russell Edson demonstrates that prose poetry frees the content of the poem from having to be limited by any structure or scheme, and lets the subject matter create its own structure.

Russell Edson like Thomas Pynchon and J.D Salinger hides away from fame and lets his work speak for his own notoriety. Indeed his poems seem to have the same effect, as instead of explaining themselves they leave interpretations up to the audience. His poems are dream-like sequences in which nothing is for certain, and the point at which you enter the story or the world of that story is always from some mid point, like a dream, never from any solid beginning. In his poem “Conjugal” a women is flexible enough to be physically bent into a myriad of positions by her husband, in this way Edson is hinting that women in the late mid 20th century were often dominated by their husbands and the only roles they could play were domestic, by pleasing the husbands every need, “bending” to every whim. The poem may be highly fictional and sensational yet it helps describe and tries to bring out the obtuse issues in marriage because of its non-sensical sachem. Edson who admitted in an interview to being “neo-surrealist” was quoted saying: "Dreams create their own art works at night in a language of signs, images, gestures, and metaphor, all in a dumb show. The subconscious does not know how to speak in the conscious language. Trying to put a dream into words is like trying to translate a painting into words." His use of dreams accompanies his abandonment for structure, just dreams abandon reality and only reference towards it through the subconscious mind. Then again using surrealism frees him from association, he can now “bend” the woman and use the image freely without consequence, that liberates his images to explore a meshing of solid object or fact with fantasy to enhance his message (Miltner). Metaphors like in dreams are easier to translate if they embossed by unrealistic nature of the poem, and the structure must be able to hold and encompass the way the surrealism changes the narration.

Edson's poems repeat a subconscious narrative that lacks any moral constitution or code where anything imagined is possible without social consequence. As Lee Upton states in his essay “Structural Politics: The Prose Poetry of Russell Edson” : “ In Edson’s prose poetry, structures - whether of hierarchical social arrangement, gender, or language itself as mastering and persuasive form - tragically constrict. Repeatedly, Edson’s prose poems reflect the oder of culturally sustained ideologies of violence.” Edson subsequently uses the way the content speaks to us as the way in which the poem is structured using an unconscious logic. Russell Edson poems look deeper into the unconscious logic that surrounds the way in which we arrange and placate issues in our modern world such as classism, race, family matters and gender roles, and as he states: “The unconscious world can only be located from the conscious world” (“Soul” 88’) That his foray into the unconscious realm using poetry helps people see beyond a sort of conscious world and bring forth the political and philological issues so that readers will understand them because of their exaggerated nature. (Upton 102) By using no real structure it hard for the reader to expect a change in reality, as their is no way of predicting it without the structure, Edson then can let his poems twist and turn with the introduction of each image.