Chekhov's Mistress
re Russell Edson
On my drive-by visit to the AWP writer’s conference it looks like I missed something great: The Tribute to Russell Edson hosted by Sentence (an excellent journal of prose poetry). The Kenyon Review blog says this:
“And while the mainstream may prefer a poetry that feels more rarefied, precious, and noble, I advocate space for Edson, the humanist. We need his poems, and we need what they teach us–that comedy in poetry shouldn’t be a ticket to the ghetto of the margins, but rather recognized for what it is–a tool that permits us to delight in the emotive force of a poem.”
Edson is is certainly not rarefied or precious (“…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.”), but I didn’t think he had been marginalized – any more than most poets, that is – and some of his books are listed for high prices on the internet. He is an exemplar prose poet and it takes something special to write ‘non-prosaic’ prose poetry. One thing, to me at least, is that certain cleverness that exists in any form that has to get across an idea so much more than sum of the words before you, and in a tiny tiny little space. My summation of Edson last time I mentioned him here: ((Groucho Marx + Charles Bukowski)/Baudelaire) = Russell Edson.
Here’s the beginning of the poem that introduced me to Edson:
an excerpt from “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.
No no, says the man, you’re to blame.
No no, says the little man, you’re out of proportion. When
you go into the distance you’re supposed to get smaller. You
mustn’t think that we can shrink and sell all the time to suit everybody coming out of the distance.
But you have it wrong, cries the man, we’re the same size, it is you who are refusing to be optically correct…”
comments
I’d never heard of Sentence before this and am very happy to know that such a publication exists. I love prose poetry--Killarney Clary is one of my favorites (especially her book, Who Whispered Near Me).
– amcorrea (02/15 at 02:34 PM)
Page 1 of 1 pages of comments
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