A Portrait in Ellipses - illustration by prose poet Russell Edson, 1935–2014

What many readers enjoy about poetry is the heartfelt connection with the world of the poet through language, sensations, feelings, perceptions and musings contained within the poem. Even someone like myself who doesn’t usually read that much poetry, the three poems below resonate:

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

How Poetry Comes to Me by Gary Snyder

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

Each Ecstatic Instant by Emily Dickinson

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.

But what to make of the prose poems of Russell Edson, where the whole dynamic of poetry in the conventional sense is turned on its head? As Goodreads reviewer Nina observed, Edson uses his poems to play puppeteer with his characters, where men, women, animals, plant life and objects function as little more than dolls or “soulless stick figures against a blank backdrop.” And these bizarre Edson-esque happenings take place in an unnervingly chaotic, jumpy universe, a universe where interspecies sex, outlandish combinations and transformations along with outbreaks of random violence are all accepted as perfectly normal. It appears we are worlds away from the the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder and Emily Dickinson. Actually, more is at stake. As Charles Simic wrote in his New York Times Review of Russell Edson: "For many readers, calling something like this poetry is not just preposterous, but an insult against every poem they have ever loved."

So what does a Russell Edson prose poem look like? For those readers unacquainted, here is a sampling of four of his shorter pieces from this collection:

Fairytale
Behind every chicken is the story of a broken egg. And behind every broken egg is the story of a matron chicken. And behind every matron is another broken egg . . .

Out of the distance into the foreground they come, Hansels and Gretels dropping egg shells as they come . . .

The Elegant Simplification
An old man’s cane had broken a bone. Actually, a cane has only one bone. One of nature’s more elegant simplifications.
As the doctor prepared the splint he asked how the cane came to break its back.
My wife, said the old man. Her head is uncommonly hard . . .

Super Monkey
He was creating a super monkey by grafting pieces of a dead parrot to a morphine monkey.
When the monkey awoke he was covered with green feathers and had a beak. His first words were, Polly wants a cracker.
It’s historic! No monkey will ever have said this before!
And so super monkey will be given all the crackers super monkey can eat, until super monkey sickens of crackers and says, Polly wants a banana. Which will be another historic quotable!

Then he’ll begin work on super-duper monkey who, with proper grafting, will be able to sing like a canary . . .

The Tree
They have grafted pieces of an ape with pieces of a dog.
Then, what they have, wants to live in a tree.
No, what they have wants to lift its leg and piss on the tree . . .


Ouch! What in the world is going on with such poetry? As a dedicated lover of Russell Edson prose poems for the past thirty years, permit me to offer a few observations:

• Each piece tells a little story and the story is told in sentences rather than verse, thus a prose poem rather than a poem;

• We have entered the world of surrealism, the world where the umbrella meets the sewing machine on the operating table, the world where anything, no matter how bizarre, outlandish, weird, odd or strange, can take place and does take place;

• The combinations and happening are as clear as clear can be, in this way, these prose poems have much in common with the paintings of René Magritte;

• The imagination is touched in ways most fantastic – another magic gate to the worlds of hallucination, dream, visions and shamanism.

And how dedicated was Russell Edson to the prose poem? He wrote mostly prose poems – more than a dozen books of prose poems over a span of forty-five years. After reading my first Russell Edson poem years ago, I found my own writer’s voice and began writing prose poems for the next eight years. I’d like to share a couple:

Under the Desert Sun
Beyond the tuba of time and the trumpet of brass fittings, they spot a spiky green growth: a cactus with two bulbous swells toward the top – a female cactus, they reckon. Coming closer, they espy drops of dried blood on the sand a few inches from the green, spiky base. Ah, yes, it must be that time of month for the female plant.

By this tuba time, their own legs – green and spiky – can’t move. The sun, fiery ball, spins a child on the tip of its tongue.

The Adventures of Maurice Moonrat
A cartoonist keeps a caged moonrat in his studio. He had this creature, a variety of hedgehog, brought all the way from the Borneo so he could create the animated cartoon version with accuracy. The cartoonist carefully studies this foot-long moonrat with its small eyes and ears in a yellowish wedge-shaped head, its sharp, pointed nose bristling with long whiskers, its pointed teeth, its hairy, brown coat and long scaly tail. When he’s done, he names his cartoon character Maurice Moonrat.

The first episode will feature Maurice Moonrat and his sidekick, Lars, a dull-witted tomcat, bobsledding in the Olympics. The cartoonist wants as much realism as possible, so he talks his studio into sending him to Lake Placid to watch real bobsledders in action. Once at the bobsled run, however, he insists on strapping the moonrat to the front of the bobsled to gauge the rodent’s reaction. The perplexed bobsledders reluctantly agree.

After the run, at the bottom of the hill, the cartoonist unstraps his moonrat, who takes a few shaky steps and curls up in a shivering mass of fur. The bobsledders understand just how cruel and sadistic the cartoonist really is when he insists the moonrat be strapped to the bobsled for a second run. There’s a second run, all right, but it isn’t anything like the cartoonist expected.

By the time they’re all reassembled at the top of the hill, there’s the beginning of a conversion to animation. Maurice Moonrat and Lars are the bobsledders, wearing helmets and sleek uniforms, Maurice the driver, Lars the brakeman, and the cartoonist is tied to the back of the bobsled, to be dragged down the track behind them. Maurice and Lars push off, running at record speed and then hop in the bobsled as they start their decent. Maurice’s pointed teeth break into a wide grin when he hears a long, drawn-out scream from his creator. ( )

Russell Edson violates every rule of writing poetry, and writes one of the best books of poetry while doing it. Hilarious and surprisingly pensive, one of the best books I've ever read. ( )