Russell Edson has been one of the premier writers of prose poetry since the 1960s. In Edson’s hands, the prose poem can be a fable, a joke, a darkly comic fairy tale, a surreal sketching of misanthropy, or the reverse, as in “The Reason Why the Closet-Man is Never Sad,” from the 1977 collection of the same name.
In the short prose poem “The Fall,” from his 1969 collection What a Man Can See, a man enters a room with a leaf in each hand, telling his parents that he’s a tree. They tell him to go outside before his roots ruin the carpet. He drops the leaves and his parents say, “Look, it is fall.” The poem falls in line with much of Edson’s work in the sense that it evinces a logic that is entirely self-contained. The parents in “The Fall” respond to their situation according to the logic of the situation, their child’s words taken at face value, just as the lunatics in “Fire Is Not a Nice Guest,” from Edson’s 1964 collection The Very Thing That Happens, respond to the man in charge of the burning insane asylum declaring a war of nutrition and calling for them to eat the fire by saying, “We are not fire-eaters, we are sword-swallowers.”
Edson’s style is admittedly simple.
“Prose comes so naturally that one doesn’t really have to choose it8212;it’s already in one’s mouth,” Edson once said.
His poems have sometimes been collected in fiction anthologies and are rarely overtly lyrical. “It was fiction that taught poetry how to speak,” Edson said.
His latest collection, See Jack, isn’t blazing new ground, but it would be silly to expect Edson to suddenly change directions after 50 years. I wouldn’t want him to anyway. See Jack might not be the best place to develop an appreciation of Edson, but it isn’t a terrible one, either. For a better introduction, I’d recommend The Tunnel, a collection spanning 20 years and handpicked by Edson.
Also, I haven’t written much about See Jack, because I find it difficult to justify paraphrasing his recent poems. Edson’s poetry holds up well on repeated readings, but ruining the joke is a constant worry. The poems are set up so expertly that a punch line delivered after a paraphrase can’t hope to stand up to the feel of reading these poems over for the first time. However, just to prove that Edson hasn’t lost his touch, I’ll try to paraphrase one of my favorites from See Jack.
In “The Fallen Maestro,” a maestro finds himself on top of a music stand in a posture of desire. Someone tells him that the musicians are waiting, and the maestro says, “Waiting8212;waiting for what? Their music stands are just as pretty as mine.”
The rest of the collection is just as good8212;better even, when you read it yourself8212;and Edson, Little Mr. Prose Poem, can hold on to the nickname he gave himself for a while longer.
