EDSON, Russell

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Nationality: American. Born: 9 April 1935. Education: Art Students League, New York; New School for Social Research, New York; Columbia University, New York; Black Mountain College, North Carolina. Family: Married Frances Edson. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1974; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1976, fellowship, 1982; Whiting Foundation award, 1989. Agent: Georges Borchardt Inc., 136 East 57th Street, New York, New York 10022. Address: 149 Weed Avenue, Stamford, Connecticut 06902, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Appearances: Fables and Drawings. Stamford, Connecticut, Thing Press, 1961.

A Stone Is Nobody's: Fables and Drawings. Stamford, Connecticut, Thing Press, 1961.

The Boundry (sic). Stamford, Connecticut, Thing Press, 1964.

The Very Thing That Happens: Fables and Drawings. New York, New Directions, 1964.

The Brain Kitchen: Writings and Woodcuts. Stamford, Connecticut, Thing Press, 1965.

What a Man Can See. Highlands, North Carolina, Jargon, 1969.

The Childhood of an Equestrian. New York, Harper, 1973.

The Clam Theatre. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

A Roof with Some Clouds behind It. Hartford, Connecticut, Bartholomew's Cobble, 1975.

The Intuitive Journey and Other Works. New York, Harper, 1976.

The Reason Why the Closet-Man Is Never Sad. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1977.

Edson's Mentality. Chicago, Oink Press, 1977.

The Traffic. Madison, Wisconsin, Red Ozier Press, 1978.

The Wounded Breakfast: Ten Poems. Madison, Wisconsin, Red Ozier Press, 1978.

With Sincerest Regrets. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1981.

Wuck Wuck Wuck! New York, Red Ozier Press, 1984.

The Wounded Breakfast. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1985.

Tick Tock. Minneapolis, Minnesota, Coffee House Press, 1992.

The Tunnel: Selected Poems. Oberlin, Ohio, Oberlin College Press, 1994.

Plays

The Falling Sickness: A Book of Plays. New York, New Directions, 1975.

Novels

Gulping's Recital. Rhinebeck, New York, Guignol, 1984.

The Song of Percival Peacock. Minneapolis, Minnesota, Coffee House Press, 1992.

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Critical Studies: A Prose Poem Anthology edited by Duane Ackerson, Pocatello, Idaho, Dragonfly Press, 1970; "Prose Poems" by William Matthews, in New American and Canadian Poetry 15 (Trumansburg, New York), 1971; "I Am Sure Happiness Is Not Too Far Away" by Thomas Meyer, in Parnassus (New York), 2(1), 1974; "On Russell Edson's Genius" by Donald Hall, in American Poetry Review 6 (Philadelphia), 5, 1977; "Portrait of the Writer As a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems" by the author, in Claims for Poetry, edited by Donald Hall, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1982; "The Essential Russell Edson: A Surrealist Reading" by Larry Smith, in Stardancer 7 (New York), 1983; "Russell Edson's Humor: Absurdity in a Surreal World" by Donald E. Hardy, in Studies in American Humor (San Marcos, Texas), 6, 1988; "Structural Politics: The Prose Poetry of Russell Edson" by Lee Upton, in South Atlantic Review (Atlanta, Georgia), 58(4), November 1993.

Russell Edson comments:

I write short prose pieces that are neither fiction nor reportage. Perhaps the currently popular term in America (although we certainly did not originate it), "prose poem," is vague enough to describe the blurred borders of my gross generality. But as soon as I say this, I want to shout that I refuse to write prose poems, that I want to write the work that is always in search of itself, in a form that is always building itself from the inside out.

In that I am more at home in my work than in describing it, I offer an example below, "A Chair":

A chair has waited such a long time to be with its person. Through shadow and fly buzz and the floating dust it has waited such a long time to be with its person. What it remembers of the forest it forgets, and dreams of a room where it waits—Of the cup and the ceiling—Of the animate one.

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Russell Edson is a central exponent of the American prose poem, a form to which he has devoted himself for some forty years. He has never been quite at ease with the term, however, preferring to describe his inventions as short prose or to speak of an undefined form discovered in the act of writing. His distinctive paragraphs appear in both poetry anthologies and in collections of short-short fiction.

Edson's work has changed little since he began to publish in the early 1960s. Derived from surrealism and the absurd, his verse paragraphs are capricious, provocative, irreverent, and hilarious. Because they are often peopled by animals, they are sometimes called fables, but they might better be called antifables, for they release energies opposite to the comforting morality of the traditional fable. They can be called moral lessons only in the obverse, since they define an amoral world, a theater of cruelty that is comically perverse, threatening, and incoherent.

There are exceptions, and one can discover conventional sentiments in the Edson oeuvre. For instance, a man looking for love is told that he will never find it "because it was anywhere you went, but you kept going because you will love nothing." One can even find an occasional soft image that suggests the influence of oriental poetry: "In the end only dough, a soft white boulder … / Faint dawn, the cry of birds …" But the haiku-like suspension of the ending is corrected by its outlandish context. The poem is about a woman who gets so caught up in kneading that her hands become part of the dough and are "worn to white wrist stumps." Finally she disappears.

The impetus in Edson is narrative and dramatic, not descriptive. Description, after all, requires stasis, but in Edson things rarely hold still long enough to be pictured. Landscape is insignificant, a "large place out the window." Characters dominate and include people, animals, and objects: a man who keeps his father in a sack, a bird that decides to become a Greek statue, a toilet that demands to be loved. Leveling is a key strategy. For example, one Edson character explains that he "no longer tells up from down"; they are "mirror images of equal value." Everything is alive with feeling and significance, but nothing is valorized.

Individual pieces range in tone and subject matter from gentle caprice to sheer foolishness to rude violence. But the emblem of Edson's oeuvre as a whole is an iconoclastic, cynical-whimsical stance, the manifestation of a fictive realm that is not merely askew but also unstable at its core.

Donald Hall has called the Edson cosmos "pure surrealism," not the surreal twist of plot or description used to surprise but "a whole irrational universe." This inside-out cosmos goes beyond confusion to celebrate coincidence and make the alogical seem everyday. Primal and infantile, it writhes with loony metamorphosis, good-natured cannibalism, lighthearted bestiality, and comic violence. Edson's world includes a rat who "wanted to put its tail in an old woman's vagina" to keep it from getting stepped on, identical twins who have to take turns being alive, a woman who beats an ox to death with her apron strings, a man who has a mouse for a daughter and, while teaching her to dance, steps on her and then presses her like a flower into a book. Nonsensical as they are, the stories are not meaningless. They hold meanings we recognize but rarely acknowledge; they are subtext made surface.

Edson's most persistent target is the myth of the happy family, which he defines as a falsehood:

     A husband and wife discover that their children are
   fakes.
     Mildred is not a real daughter.
     Nor is Frederick a real son.
     But then the husband discovers that his wife is not a
   real wife, even as she discovers that he is not a real
     husband.
     So it's all right if a fake husband and a fake wife have
   fakes for children.
     Even their neighbors are fakes …

In particular, Edson likes to debunk the beatification of motherhood:

There was also a huge face on mother's back which was her real face. The other little face was a phoney little face that pretends kindness on the front of her head. The huge face looks at one as mother pretends to be washing dishes at the sink, it is the big ugly man that looks out of her back, her apron tied in the back to effect a bow tie effect for the big ugly man.

Most of Edson's mothers are absurdist recapitulations of tired Freudian dogma, and the destructive mythic mother appears again and again. In one selection a young man becomes infatuated with a piece of toast, which his mother eats: "In a moment's time mother had eaten the only thing that I had ever come near to loving." He grabs another piece as a substitute: "Mother seeing my happiness and admiring my grownupness slapped me with affection across the mouth."

Eating—devouring—is central in Edson's writing. Everything feeds on everything else. A cookie eats a man "with a glass of milk and a kind word from the man's mother." An old woman cooks her dog for his own dinner and then realizes that he cannot eat himself. A physician, called to heal a poor duck that got cooked by mistake, eats his patient part by part, suggesting prosthetic replacements for each eaten leg and wing; when he has eaten all of it, he suggests that a rubber duck could take its place. Edson defines his province as "a land" that is "eating itself" and "forming itself." At the center of this universe God is eating a jelly sandwich.

Edson's plot is the familiar twentieth-century story of alienation and outrage. Yet Edson is an original among the many iconoclasts who unmask our nice ideas. He has taken forms typical of absurd drama and surreal film or fiction and embedded them in the prose poem. His zany realm is closer to Chaplin, Pynchon, or Vonnegut than to the territory of most poets. His odd, flat, jerky, childish syntax; his distinct manner, which combines a chuckle, a scream, and a shrug; the pure otherness of his world—these combine to provide a remedy to sweet, harmless verses.

—Jane Somerville