Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson, ed. Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Edson was one of the definitive practitioners of the contemporary American prose poem. Charles Simic, in his beautiful Foreword, says that no one has yet offered a convincing definition of prose poetry. Nonetheless, permit me to make an attempt. Is a prose poem just a poem with no line breaks? If so, what can prose sentences and paragraphs do for a poem that lines can’t? What is prose and what is poetry, and what are the supposed differences between them? The poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard, who was my graduate school mentor and friend, has a wonderfully useful and precise maxim for describing the difference between poetry and prose: “verse reverses, prose proceeds.”

This concise and musical phrase summarizes what I believe to be one of the central truths about the nature of these two forms of writing: though made of the same basic stuff—letters, words, punctuation—once they take their shapes, they are actually different substances, like water and oil (though they do mix), or, perhaps, more like water and wood. They are composed of the same elements, but those elements are deployed so differently that the results can seem like distant cousins at best.

But what are they? First, we need a definition of “prose”: it’s the word on the street; the writing people talk in; the words on signs; and the stuff, beside images, that the Internet is made of. In itself, it’s not scary (though lots of it piled up, say, in a big, fat book, might be). Reading prose, you might not even realize you’re reading it. (“‘No, And’: Russell Edson’s Poetry of Contradiction,” Craig Morgan Teicher)

Years ago I read an essay by American poet Sarah Manguso on the prose poems of Connecticut poet Russell Edson (1935-2014); despite usually believing and following whatever Manguso might say about anything, I was never convinced by the work of Russell Edson, said to be the father of the American prose poem. I even picked up a copy of his prior selected a few years back, The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson (Oberlin College Press, 1994), but couldn’t figure my way. I couldn’t hear music in his poems, feeling them closer to incomplete short stories than to the electric possibilities of the prose poem, especially against poets such as Rosmarie Waldrop, Lisa Jarnot, Lisa Robertson, Robert Kroetsch, Anne Carson and others. How was Edson’s work so praised?

So of course, I was curious to see a copy of Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson, ed. Craig Morgan Teicher, with a Foreword by Charles Simic (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023) land in my mailbox recently; perhaps this collection might provide some sense of what it is I’d been missing, or at least, not getting? Perhaps it is as simple as requiring the correct entry point in my reading. In my late twenties, after hearing from a variety of writers around me on the brilliance of the work of Toronto poet David McFadden, the half-dozen titles I encountered weren’t providing me with any answers as to why, until I picked up a copy of his Governor General’s Award-shortlisted The Art of Darkness (McClelland and Stewart, 1984), a book that became my personal Rosetta Stone for the since-late McFadden’s fifty years of publishing. With that one title, all, including his brilliance, became abundantly and absolutely clear.

As Charles Simic offers in his introduction: “Edson said that he wanted to write without debt or obligation to any literary form or idea. What made him fond of prose poetry, he claimed, is its awkwardness and its seeming lack of ambition. The monster children of two incompatible strategies, the lyric and the narrative, they are playful and irreverent.” Little Mr. Prose Poem selects pieces from ten different collections produced during Edson’s life: The Very Thing That Happens (New Directions, 1964), What A Man Can See (The Jargon Society, 1969), The Childhood of an Equestrian (Harper and Row, 1973), The Clam Theater (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), The Intuitive Journey (Harper and Row, 1976), The Reason Why the Closet Man Is Never Sad (Wesleyan University Press, 1977), The Wounded Breakfast (Wesleyan University Press, 1985), The Tormented Mirror (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), The Rooster’s Wife (BOA Editions, 2005) and See Jack (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). Given the final collection on this particular list emerged five years prior to the author’s death, one is left to wonder if there were uncollected pieces or even an unfinished manuscript left behind after he died? Did all of his pieces fall within the boundaries of his published books?

There are ways that Edson’s odd narratives, populated with fragments and layerings of scenes and characters, feel akin to musings, constructed as narrative accumulations across the structure of the prose poem. And yet, there are times I wonder how these are “prose poems” instead of being called, perhaps, “postcard fictions” or “flash fictions.” It would appear that an important element of Edson’s form is the way the narrratives turn between sentences: his sentences accumulate, but don’t necessarily form a straight line. There are elements of the surreal, but Edson is no surrealist; instead, he seems a realist who blurs and layers his statements up against the impossible. I might not be able to hear a particular music through Edson’s lines, but there certainly is a patterning; a layering, of image and idea, of narrative overlay, offering moments of introspection as the poems throughout the collection become larger, more complex. As well, Edson’s poems seem to favour the ellipses, offering multiple openings but offering no straightforward conclusions, easy or otherwise. Not a surrealist, but a poet who offers occasional deflections of narrative. Even a deflection is an acknowledgment of the real, as a shape drawn around an absence. A deflection, or an array of characters who might not necessarily be properly paying attention, or speaking the truth of the story, as the poem “Baby Pianos,” from The Tormented Mirror, begins:

      A piano had made a huge manure. Its handler hoped the lady of the house wouldn’t notice.
                  But the lady of the house said, what is that huge darkness?
                  The piano just had a baby, said the handler.
                  But I don’t see any keys, said the lady of the house. They come later, like baby teeth, said the handler.
                  Meanwhile the piano had dropped another huge manure.

As Craig Morgan Teicher writes as part of his afterword that Edson is “obsessed with miscommunication; it is his bedrock truth. People don’t listen to each other, are generally intent on fulfilling their own needs, and willfully ignorant of the needs of those around them. His characters constantly argue and contradict one another.” Moving through this collection, I can now see Edson’s influence in a variety of younger American poets, most overtly through Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany (who I do think is doing some great things), but also through Evan Williams, Shane Kowalski, Zachary Schomburg, Leigh Chadwick and the late Noah Eli Gordon, as well as through Manguso herself, across those early poetry collections. In many ways, Niespodziany might even be the closest to an inheritor I’ve seen of Edson’s writing, although with the added element of a more overt surrealism via Canadian poet Stuart Ross. And perhaps, through Little Mr. Prose Poem, I am slowly beginning to understand what all the fuss has been about.

Charles Rafferty, The Smoke of Horses

After the Flood

The day was bright. We saw where the water stopped rising by the marks on the vinyl siding. The raccoons had all come down from their trees, but no one could say where they had gone. On our walk, we found a truck tire welded to the riverbank. The water beside it was a silver ribbon. It was doing its best impression of something that would not chew holes in the railbeds and cover the town with a fine patina of river mud. It was “bucolic,” the word the realtors used, convincing us to build here—beneath the trees that never burn, the sky that is ever blue.

I must say, I’m intrigued by the prose poems of Connecticut poet and fiction writer Charles Rafferty’s latest collection, The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2017), his latest in a line of over a dozen published books, yet the first I’ve spent any time with. While my preference for the form of the prose poem leans far closer to the lyric of poets such as Sawako Nakayasu [see my review of her latest here], Jennifer Kronovet [see my review of her latest here] or Amelia Martens [see my review of her latest here] and others, there is a straightforwardness to Rafferty’s narrative prose poems that is quite appealing. Existing somewhere between poetry and the very short story, the pieces in The Smoke of Horses are short and self-contained, composed as single-stanza meditations and observational poems on multiple aspects of the world as it is, as it might be, and even, possibly, as it should be. While he does lean far closer to the side of the very short story, there is a fluidity to his prose, far stronger than the pointedly-straight (and to my mind, pointedly dull) prose poems of Russell Edson; there is a narrative line, but one attuned to the lyric, equally at home in poetry and short fiction. As he writes in the poem “Two People Kissing in the Park as Seen from a Speeding Train”: “It was that kind of story.”

And yet, Rafferty’s The Smoke of Horses occupies the same stylistic and structural territory as the short story writer Lydia Davis (who provides a quote on the back cover of this collection). How is one considered a short story writer while the other is considered a poet? Is this a territory where the naming of genre is as fluid as their lines?

Barbarian

After the invaders entered the palace, they dragged the great tapestries down. They cut them apart as they called for beer, and the queen was made to serve them without taking off her crown. Later, she gathered up the scraps and took them to the stables so that she might end the shivering of her enemies’ horses.

sentence: a journal of prose poetics #9

Two Agents

We’re nothing but a dream of polar magnets, little ghost. Curtains could be painted or suddenly real. Brezhnev is coming, a minor detail clinking to his belt, a tugboat with trailer lights, our widemouth jar of spacedust. Not Hölderlin enough? Even dogs can’t live forever in imitation sunlight. Surrounded by flares, we knew to set aside our spines, lisping out absinthe, looking for our coats. (Elizabeth Willis)

I seem to have missed the previous issue, but good to see the new volume of sentence:a journal of prose poetics, the first by incoming editor Brian Johnson, replacing founding editor Brian Clements. Originally founded to “continue the tradition of publishing excellent prose poems established by Peter Johnson’s The Prose Poem: an International Journal,” sentence (as Johnson’s “Foreword” writes) works to “foster the Protean vitality of the prose poem.” 

This issue features a section titled “Abstraction and the Prose Poem,” guest-edited by Richard Deming, which (as Johnson writes) “brings together an impressive range of poets working in and around the conventions of the prose poem, trying to extend both the medium and its messages.” 

I’m intrigued by the notions of what Johnson considers the “conventions” of the prose poem, as I’ve noticed much of the American variant on the form far more prosaic (a la Russell Edson) than the Canadian one (a la Robert Kroetsch). 

What are the conventions? Where do the differences begin?

The lost (the

drowning the fata morgana) is a lonely word poling its way from one mouth to another. As if pregnant as if to breed tongues but then hangs in the air like a fist of cloud the size of a pea. It is sad that the everything between burned down and it is sad that the everything between did not burn completely but only partly with most of it exposed and now the what’s left lodging into the corners that are no longer there. And only the face left floating in the corners. Words are lonely boats and the mouth has to launch one word at a time maybe this. (Jeanne Stauffer-Merle)

Part of the ability of the prose-poem is to exist entirely in that open space between what is considered “poem” and “prose,” leaving a pretty vast and wide spectrum of structural options, a number of which appears quite readily in the pages of sentence: a journal of prose poetics. With pieces by Paige Taggert, Aaron Shurin, Tom Dickinson and many others, the special “abstraction” feature is, to my mind, far more striking, with pieces by Julie Carr, Peter Gizzi, Charles Bernstein, Matthew Cooperman, Susan Briante, Andrew Zawacki, John Ashbery, Rosmarie Waldrop, Ron Padgett and many more. Bernstein’s pieces are memorable for how well he manages to tear prose-poem sentences apart, whether literally or simply spaced around the page, and still manage to have them considered prose poems.

Unready, Unwilling, Unable

Peerlessly literal,

We’re a little nearer than we were.

There is nothing I would rather see

than an angel dancing on a rhyme

or a unicorn playing Phaedra.

I love humanity; it’s people I can’t bear.

I am a Jewish man trapped

in the body of a Jewish man.

I love people;

humanity scares me.

If nothing is translatable, then

everything is.

Scars me. (Charles Bernstein)

The issue concludes with a handful of book reviews, which extend a further and essential engagement with the prose poem form. Still, I keep hoping to see Lea Graham in here, with one or two of those magnificent epistolary poems she’s been writing lately, in her “Dear Robert Kroetsch” series. Perhaps by issue #10.

Chinese New Year in Illinois

I won’t light a firecracker or take part in the ritual to dust the rafter, sweep eaves, or hang scrolls of red carp and fat boy in grandma’s tangwu. Her house is empty. There will be no reunion this year as she migrates to the world of yin and I move, from the Middle Kingdom to the Midwest. The lantern of childhood still burns my eyes. I pull out my one Sichuanese recipe book and begin to read. I read into night, past time and winter until I see wind-dried sausages lit by red pepper, blood oranges glow on bare boughs. I read so attentively I could be studying the composition of poetry or alchemy. There is no hunger like this, no such longing. (Jie Tian)