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| Russell Edson |
All it took was reading one of Russell
Edson’s prose poems to know that he was going to be my favorite poet (apologies to Robinson Jeffers and Charles Bukowski). Reading more of Edson's work over the last few weeks has only confirmed that.
I had never heard of Russell Edson
until coming across some examples of his work in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones last month. I immediately ordered a used copy
of The Tunnel, Edson’s book of
selected poems. After receiving the book
I Googled his name to learn more about my new favorite poet, only to discover
that he had passed away on 4/29/14.
Edson's "poems" are not like poems in the conventional sense. For example, they don't rhyme or follow any kind of structure or meter, but instead tread the subconscious like real-life dream sequences. Here are four of his poems, followed by my favorite quotes from the interviews I've been able to find online. Edson's interview responses are so good you don't even need to know what the question was.
Waiting for the Signal Man
A
woman said to her mother, where is my daughter?
Her
mother said, up you and through me and out of grandmother; coming all the way
down through all women like a railway train, trailing her brunette hair, which
streams back grey into white; waiting for the signal man to raise his light so
she can come through.
What
she waiting for? said the woman.
For
the signal man to raise his light, so she can see to come through.
The Automobile
A
man had just married an automobile.
But
I mean to say, said his father, that the automobile is not a person because it
is something different.
For
instance, compare it to your mother. Do
you see how it is different from your mother?
Somehow it seems wider, doesn't it?
And besides, your mother wears her hair differently.
You
ought to try to find something in the world that looks like mother.
I
have mother, isn't that enough that looks like mother? Do I have to gather more mothers?
They
are all old ladies who do not in the least excite any wish to procreate, said
the son.
But
you cannot procreate with an automobile, said father.
The
son shows father an ignition key. See,
here is a special penis which does with the automobile as the man with the
woman; and the automobile gives birth to a place far from this place, dropping
its puppy miles as it goes.
Does
that make me a grandfather? said father.
That
makes you where you are when I am far away, said the son.
Father
and mother watch an automobile with a just married sign on it growing smaller
in a road.
The Fall
There
was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his
parents that he was a tree.
To
which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living-room as
your roots may ruin the carpet.
He
said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves.
But
his parents said look it is fall.
A Cottage in the Wood
He
has built himself a cottage in a wood, near where the insect rubs its wings in
song.
Yet,
without measure, or proper sense of scale, he has made the cottage too
small. He realizes this when only his
hand will fit through the door. He tries
the stairs to the second floor with his fingers, but his arm wedges in the
entrance. He wonders how he will cook
his dinner. He might get his hands
through the kitchen window. But even so,
he will not be able to cook enough on such a tiny stove.
He
shall also lie unsheltered in the night, even though a bed with its covers
turned down waits for him in the cottage.
He
lies down and curls himself around the cottage, listening to the insect that
rubs its wings in song.
Russell Edson quotes:
I don't work with preconceived ideas
about reality.
Writing for me is the fun
of discovery. Which means I want to discover something I didn't know forming on
the page. Experience made into an artifact formed with the logic of a
dream. The poem is the experience no matter
the background of experience it is drawn from.
I sit down to write with a blank page
and a blank mind. Wherever the organ of reality (the brain) wants to go I
follow with the blue pencil of consciousness.
I have no formal background in
anything. I just make up things as I go along without a program. It's more fun
that way.
Just get something on the page, you
have nothing to lose except your life, which you're going to lose anyway.
In poetry the patterns of rhythm and
rhyme give distraction that the dream brain might be free to dream.
What do I do outside of the tunnel? Is there an outside?
Just being able to write a sentence,
or a group of them into a paragraph, means something has happened.
At best the poem is an impersonal
amusement where the writer and the reader laugh together at finding once again
that only reality is the reality of the brain thinking about reality.
The prose poem allows the
individual to create his or her own boundaries.
The good writer tries to
write beyond genre.
What name one gives or
doesn't give to his or her writing is far less important than the work itself. But
fables are message stories, and I don't like messages. Fairy tales say in their
openings, we're not real, but we're fun. My purpose has always been reality, and it
still is. I learned to write by writing;
but with an intuition for a way that wasn't more than what I could bring to it.
For me the spirit of the
prose poem is writing without genre; to go naked with only one's imagination.
Pure poetry, for instance,
is silence. It was fiction that taught
poetry how to speak.
Words are the enemy of
poetry.
The poet has to create into
language something that has no language.
The best advice I can give
is to ignore advice. Life is just too
short to be distracted by the opinions of others. The main thing is to get going with your work
however you see it. The beginning writer
has only to write to find his art. It's
not a matter of talent. We're all
talented. Desire and patience takes us
where we want to go.
I write to be entertained, which
means surprised. A good many poets write
out of what they call experience. This
seems deadened. For me the poem itself,
the act of writing it, is the experience, not all the dark crap behind it.
If I've done anything special,
and of course I have, it's just by doing what anybody could have if they
thought it worth doing.
I like making something out
of almost nothing at all. It leaves room
to imagine rather than retelling what one already knows. I think of myself more as an inventor than a
decorator.
There's only the writing,
which I admit to knowing very little about.
My best pieces seem written
by someone, or something, else.
We work best when our
intellects and imaginations are in harmony at the time of the writing. I like to go real fast before I ruin what I'm
writing by thinking about it. It's looking
for the shape of thought more than the particulars of the little narrative.
My ideal prose poem is a
small, complete work, utterly logical within its own madness.
Insanity is always at the
elbow, and so I try for order on the page.
One shouldn't have to
explain anything to the reader.
Unless one is describing
something entirely different than what one knows of the given world,
description is deadly to a prose poem.
I never liked the term
"experimental writing," but what else is a prose poem? Having written a number of them, I still don't
know how they're written.
I write for amusement, not
to change others.
I write as a reader, not
knowing what the author will say next.
One sometimes needs a
vacation from the idea of oneself. The
prose poem is the perfect vacation spot. I've been going there for years.
Movements bore me. They're usually peopled by those needing
umbrellas even when it's not raining
I always write what needs to
be written at the time of its writing.
Anybody could write like
Edson if they wanted to. I find myself
doing it all the time.
Prose poems look easy
precisely because they are. The hardest
part for many who would write them is accepting how easy they are to write, and
having the courage to write them in spite of that.
In that the prose poem is a
critique of the very act of writing, it's probably so surprised that anybody
would be writing it that it almost giggles as it finds itself on the page.
An influence, if it has any
positive meaning, is really a kind of permission that allows us to open
something in ourselves.
It was possible to make
things out of almost nothing at all. That's a very creative feeling, starting
from almost zero and being able to make something that's at least trivial. And sometimes to make something somewhat more
than trivial. But trivial will do. At least it's more than the zero of nothing. People tend to aspire to more than they need,
when in the end they turn out to be just another corpse belonging to the
general ecology.
The
idea of someone bravely speaking in public with a pronounced speech defect can
be quite touching, particularly to people out for an evening of culture.
No
one is a poet for all of his or her life. One is a poet when one is engaging that way of
mind; that is to say, when one is writing. I would say to a son or daughter, ‘go ahead,
it’s as good as anything else; your days are numbered anyway no matter what
you do - have fun’.
Anybody
who says that his art takes all his time is probably someone whose time doesn’t
mean very much. My advice is to schedule
one’s ‘artistic works’ with a job that pays. This gives time edge and purpose.
The problem with poetry
is that it spends so much time scene setting, locating. Most of my pieces are not really located. They just happen.
I never write for
people, for the unseen audience. I just write
what comes.
A lot of poets would do
themselves a lot of good if they had another art they messed with - be it
painting or whatever. A lot of our
poets, they write, they teach, they write blurbs, they write some criticism,
but they never get out of language. To be able to do something else is a nice
thing.
