Chekhov's Mistress
((Groucho Marx + Charles Bukowski)/Baudelaire) = Russell Edson
“Edson has built his own trademark hallucinatory narratives—short (usually not longer than a page), sparsely punctuated, mostly third-person tales with a kind of once-upon-a-time approachability (though they can be dense) and a startling, sensual, and often persuasive intimation of subconscious order.”
The problem that I have with Edson’s poetry is that some of it so good that the rest seems utterly disappointing. He’s not a poet for every sensibility either, with tales of men running around in women’s underwear, pregnant dead men and a rat trying to get dirty with an old woman. Still, some of these I find really catching, like the poem called “Monkey Gas:”
…But, as I was picking ape out of my teeth, and belching what I thought were ape flavored belches, I discovered that I was actually belching monkey gas.
I said to the waiter, Why am I belching monkey instead of ape?
You’ve probably got a case of monkey gas, he said.
Monkey gas? But the menu said, ape.
It’s the octopus, he said. He ran out of ink, and had just enough for ape. Though monkeys are smaller, they take twice the ink…
(Edson ends his poems with ellipses, but that wasn’t the end, just an excerpt.) Yeah, it’s a bit “yuk-yuk” but it’s fun to read (and a restaurant near me has “monkey-gland sauce” on the menu, so it caught my eye) and fairly indicative of the playfulness that Edson never lets go of.
Since I had not intended to write anything on this book and Mr. Harp did such a thoughtful job, I’ll give you a piece of his concluding paragraph:
The best poems here work autonomously; their force creates an experience so unusual and evocative as to suck all other reality out of the room. Occasionally, though, Edson’s poems rely too much on the consistency of their creator’s method, working less as independent utterances than as conventional features in the poet’s familiar (and admittedly virtuoso) corpus.
I first found Edson through an anthology that included his poem “The Optical Prodigal:”
A man sees a tiny couple in the distance, and thinks they
might be his mother and father.
But when he gets to them they’re still little.
You’re still little, he says, don’t you remember?
Who said you were supposed to be here? says the little
husband. You’re supposed to be in your own distance; you’re
still in your own foreground, you spendthrift…
It goes on and by the end it’s a pretty wry, thought-provoking piece. It’s really one of my favorite light poems and certainly my favorite prose poem. I bring it up to show that there is more to Edson than what I might have suggested above. And although as Harp says, many of the poems in The Rooster’s Wife are “instantly forgettable,” I would add that like a witty, well-timed joke, they also speak some truths that might not get said any other way.
Read widely, think well, and write often
comments
Great to see Edson discussed and appreciated here (such an odd yet sort of addicting poet)--fine commentary and I’ll have to look for the review you mention!
– Frank Sazani (06/30 at 02:43 AM)
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