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 accent the obtuse issues in marriage because of its non-sensical meter. 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. In some cases Edsons poems become Baktinian in a juxtaposition between a Carnivalesque style in which where status quo divisions and caste, class, race, age and profession become equal and are interchangeable with each other (Mclane). This allows the state of the poem to become altered, as it requires no societal context, so like the structure itself, the content frees itself from any long lasting social form. For example in the poem “Amyloo” a man “erases” his daughter Amyloo and then proceeds to purge the memory of Amyloo from his wife's memory:

A father with a huge eraser erases his daughter. When he finishes there's only a red smudge on the wall.
His wife says, where is Amyloo?
She's a mistake, I erased her.
What about all her lovely things? asks his wife.
I'll erase them too.
All her pretty clothes? . . .
I'll erase her closet, her dresser--shut up about Amyloo! Bring your head over here and I'll erase Amyloo out of it.
The husband rubs his eraser on his wife's forehead, and as she begins to forget she says, hummm, I wonder whatever happened to Amyloo? . . .
Never heard of her, says her husband.
And you, she says, who are you? You're not Amyloo, are you? I don't remember your being Amyloo. Are you my Amyloo, whom I don't remember anymore? . . .
Of course not, Amyloo was a girl. Do I look like a girl?
. . . I don't know, I don't know what anything looks like anymore. . .

Like before this scheme mimics a Jungian or Freudian outtake on the human subconscious where all objects collide, separate, and meet again in different ways that symbolize the conscious realm of the mind, where inanimate and animate things become subjective as part of our conscious and subconscious pathos. In Amyloo the father without any real conscious morality is able to just erase his daughter, Edsons plain speech seems to accompany this lack of moral acquisition. Many of his characters lack any sort of moral conscious or even seemed affected by their odd often violent situations, which goes to show that their mental state and development is purely psychology and subconscious changes (Upton 102). As Mclane states: “Edson goes immeasurably further to create a world where the living and the mechanical, the two-legged and the four-legged, are equal and undifferentiated in any conventional sense.” The way the structure of the prose poem lends to this is that it can be written in manner that requires no pacific line breaks and no rhyme scheme, it follows a Jack Kerouc or Miller like stream of consciousness where what comes out is what appears on the page, but it is condensed into brief poem that gives us enough time to digest the poem itself.

Russell Edson’s father Gus Edson was a cartoonist who replaced Sidney Smith, creator of the “Andy Gump” newspaper character (Milner). Because of his cartoonist upbringing Edson’s poems have been compared to literary examples of cartoons in which his topics while social relevant and up to date like most comics and distort and contort the reality of those topics in order to find meaning, truth and humor in those situations. The format of his poems are done in a frame like formula where there are ten to twelve different frames that slowly divulge the end punch-line or truth behind the storyboard, the prose poem extends in the same way until it reaches its conclusion. In his essay The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (1998) he states: “almost all of Edson's prose poems . . . consist of a series of short paragraphs, most of which are only one sentence. . . . The different phases of the narrative, which testify to the author's fascination with the eccentric and the bizarre, reflect his predilection for short 'scenes' with a strictly limited narrative scope and with plotlines built upon a particular detail or a succession of details." In this way Deville is comparing the narrative of a cartoon storyboard to that of Edsons prose poem, in way that the poems build momentum with each detail and image until a conclusion surfaces just as randomly as the beginning of the poem starts. For example in the poem “Accident” :

he barber has accidentally taken off an ear. It lies like

something newborn on the floor in a nest of hair.

Oops, says the barber, but it musn't've been a very good

ear, it came off with very little complaint.

It wasn't, says the customer, it was always overly waxed.

I tried putting a wick in it to burn out the wax, thus to find my

way to music. But lighting it I put my whole head on fire. It

even spread to my groin and underarms and to a nearby

forest. I felt like a saint. Someone thought I was a genius.

That's comforting, says the barber, still, I can't send you

home with only one ear. I'll have to remove the other one. But

don't worry, it'll be an accident.

Symmetry demands it. But make sure it's an accident, I

don't want you cutting me up on purpose.

Maybe I'll just slit your throat.

But it has to be an accident . . .

The poem starts off like any comic strip with an accurance this being the barber “accidentally” removing the ear. Then the next segment the customer is alright the fatality of his ear, and the conversation is short and cropped almost like speech bubbles where a small sentences help describe the imagery and lend to it rather then actually distort it. Soon after the barber decides to cut of the other ear because “symmetry demands it”, this turn of events throws a curveball at us as we are not expecting it. Yet the repetition of syntax in the poem sets up a story board logic because of the elementary vocabulary in the dialog, that mimics the way speech-bubbles work in cartoons (Upton). His poems act as a dark commentary or satire of cultural issues and politics that helps bring to light and characterize these issues. Which like in cartoons subtle political motives are incorporated into often c