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.

essays in the face of uncertainties

“It’s impossible to fail if one doesn’t know how the end should look.” writes American writer Sarah Manguso, as part of her 300 Arguments (2017). “And it’s impossible to succeed. But it’s possible to enjoy.” I catch a freshly-posted article on Lit Reactor that speaks to writing while parenting small children, especially during the lock-downs. The entire article boils down to “write when you can,” with the appropriate amount of “don’t feel guilty” sprinkled in. This is what I did when our girls were smaller, writing in bursts as toddler Rose napped, fully aware that once she woke, my writing day had ended. From there, as though this, it is important to be realistic about one’s goals, and the difficulties in attempting them. I am still seeking that collection of essays by Alice Notley, which might even have become my white whale. I’ve somehow decided that this writing requires it, but might also not be able to survive beyond it. What am I searching for? Perhaps I should spend more of my time on the blank page, as Robert Kroetsch suggested as part of A Likely Story: The writing life (1995):

             A scrapbook is an exceptional kind of book in that it comes to us as a collection of blank pages. We must become authors before we can become readers. Or perhaps we must become readers before we can become authors.

            Right there is a lesson that first-year students struggle to learn. Perhaps instead of giving each new student a giant heap of books to read, we should present each with a blank book and invite him or her to fill it with the story of how one gets an education.

On May 16, The New York Times wrote of former American President Barack Obama delivering a virtual commencement speech, “urging thousands of graduates at historically black colleges and universities ‘to seize the initiative’ at a time when he says the nation’s leaders have fumbled the response to the coronavirus pandemic.” Speaking directly to “more than 27,000 students at 78 participating historically black colleges and universities,” the commencement speech was one of the rare addresses he’s given in such a public sphere since the end of his presidency, and one that was also seen as speaking directly to a wider American populace. With the absence of leadership through the current White House during this crisis, his address was both direct and optimistic, speaking directly to that absence of leadership, the disparities that have come to light throughout the pandemic, and how any community is stronger together than apart, asking for calm, fortitude and a resolve to work together.

“Whether you realize it or not, you’ve got more road maps, more role models, and more resources than the Civil Rights generation did,” he said. “You’ve got more tools, technology, and talents than my generation did. No generation has been better positioned to be warriors for justice and remake the world.”

Even the blank page is ______.

essays in the face of uncertainties

Noah Eli Gordon, Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down?

The Problem

Someone tied to a parking meter the dog that barks every time a woman approaches to insert a quarter. This makes her the subject. It is a metaphor for the aristocracy of money. One performer plays both leash and dog. Another stands in for the meter. I play the woman. Someone appears offstage. It is often difficult to tell a king from a queen. The problem is no one plays the difficulty.

Boulder, Colorado poet Noah Eli Gordon’s latest poetry title is Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2018), a collection I’ve been looking forward to seeing ever since I first saw selections from it in Ugly Ducking Presse’s 6x6 back in 2012 [see my review of such here]. Similar in structure to his collection The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], the poems in this new work all share the same title, “The Problem,” with the bulk of the collection made up of prose poems, with none longer than a single page. Unlike The Source, made up of poems titled “The Source,” his collection of poems each titled “The Problem” isn’t titled The Problem, or some otherwise clever wordplay, but (obviously) Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down?. With the alternate title, it is as though the collection isn’t overcome by the repetition, and the potential of repeating a structure that had worked in the past. It would be curious to know if his initial thoughts on the final publication of The Source was indeed an influence, as this collection was composed during the period he was most likely seeing The Source through to publication, as he writes as part of the acknowledgments: “These problems were encountered mostly in Brooklyn, NY, in the summer of 2010, lingering on in Denver, CO, until about February of 2011.”

The Problem

In order to keep things straight, she tapes a timeline marking the important events of her novel to the bedroom wall. I think this could be the first sentence of my novel. The problem is it’s already written.

The poems are incredibly sharp, and composed as odd narratives, descriptive passages, alternate perspectives and even hesitant wisdoms, a number of which take their time to sink in, as any new perspective or wisdom might. The book is dedicated to American poet Sawako Nakayasu, “in return for the gift of her translation / of Ayane Kawata’s poem ‘Running Posture’ / in Castles in the Air,” a poem and book I’d been previously unaware of (although I’m an admirer of the work I’ve seen of hers). Discovering the poem online on the publisher’s page for the book (a book I now have to order, clearly), it reads:

I am being chased and so I run, though the problem lies not in the fact that someone is chasing me, but in the posture with which I run away.

The problem, Gordon might suggest, is that I haven’t read exactly all the same works he has, nor he me, altering the ways in which I might approach such a book as this. While I might not be aware of that particular translation, my initial take on the collection compared Gordon’s use of the prose poem, composed as a blend of gestural koan and short story, to Sarah Manguso’s short story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s, 2007). Manguso’s is a book that heavily influenced my own debut short story collection, The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), both of which were composed out of a sequence of untitled and self-contained short, single-paragraph prose fictions that meet somewhere in the blend of essay, short story and musing (and a book, it would seem, I began working on during the same period Gordon composed Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down?). One might argue that all three collections, Gordon’s included, work from the founding premise that something is wrong (or at least amiss, or slightly off), and the awareness that there is always, constantly, something else happening in the poem, just out of view, out of reach and out of focus. What is curious about Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? is in seeing the accumulation of poems structured around a similar premise, one that allows “the problem” to sometimes be the entire point, and other times, the distraction, and occasionally an idea that steps carefully out of the way of the poem, even while remaining the engine that drives both the individual pieces and the book as a whole.

The Problem

He sends a hurried email to a distant relative detailing the particulars of his upcoming arrival—dates, places, a somewhat transparent formal tone, and immediately regrets not having done so in a more intimate fashion, with a postcard perhaps. Perhaps with this one, the one where the sun is either rising or setting, flanked by high clouds and flecked with pink, like the meat of a flower whose name he’s failed to learn. It’s as though he’s realized there was music playing because there isn’t anymore—the sudden silence of the world as much an indescribable flower as it is the description of one staring directly at it. The sun, rising and setting, setting and rising. But not, as we know, in that exact order.

There is something about the shift of the title that displays the strength of the collection, and what might have allowed this book to be as strong as it is, providing an opportunity for the structure not to overwhelm the work, and the author, perhaps, to himself step out of the way, and allow the work to shine through. I’ve been an admirer of Noah Eli Gordon and his work for some time, but this might easily be his strongest work to date, in part due to the subtlety of the poems, made so much more clear through the deceptive straightfowardness of the premise: Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? is not, in fact, a book about problems or telling you what the problem might be. It is a book that focuses on all the small details that lead up to that point of declaring something, true or otherwise, to be the actual problem. Does that make sense?