Russell Edson
Russell Edson (December 12, 1928 – April 29, 2014) was an American poet, novelist, writer, and illustrator. He was the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson.
He studied art early in life and attended the Art Students League as a teenager. He began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His honors as a poet include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, and several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935 and lived there with his wife Frances. Edson, who jokingly has called himself "Little Mr. Prose Poem," is inarguably the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable. In a forthcoming study of the American prose poem, Michel Delville suggests that one of Edson's typical "recipes" for his prose poems involves a modern everyman who suddenly tumbles into an alternative reality in which he loses control over himself, sometimes to the point of being irremediably absorbed--both figuratively and literally--by his immediate and, most often, domestic everyday environment. . . . Constantly fusing and confusing the banal and the bizarre, Edson delights in having a seemingly innocuous situation undergo the most unlikely and uncanny metamorphoses. . . .
Reclusive by nature, Edson has still managed to publish eleven books of prose poems and one novel, The Song of Percival Peacock (available from Coffee House Press).
“It is very difficult to stop feeling.”
“أحب الخبز حسن الشكل. الخبز الشهى. ذلك النوع من الخبز الذى يظهر فى أحلام الجوع.وكان أن التقيت بمثل ذلك الخبز. طرقت باباً(وأنا أحياناً أفعل ذلك لأحافظ على لياقة مفاصل أصابعى)؛ فظهرت امرأة ذات كتل عجينية غير متناسبة(كانت لها طلعةُ غير معجونة ولا مخبوزة) وفى يدها رغيفُ حسن الشكل إلى حدٍ ما.أخذت قضمةً وبدأ الرغيف يبكى.”
“Perhaps I should kiss the face of the kitchen clock for luck. Perhaps its little hands with rapture would encircle my neck and we might be happy. I am sure happiness is not too far away”
“I think, therefore I am, said a man whose mother quickly hit him on the head, saying, I hit my son on the head, therefore I am.No no, you've got it all wrong, cried the man.So she hit him on the head again and cried, therefore I am.You're not, not that way; you're supposed to think, not hit, cried the man.. . . I think, therefore I am, said the man.I hit, therefore we both are, the hitter and the one who gets hit, said the man's mother.But at this point the man had ceased to be; unconscious he could not think. But his mother could. So she thought, I am, and so is my unconscious son, even if he doesn't know it . . .”
“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.”
“…description is deadly to a prose poem.”
“Remember, words are the enemy of poetry.”
“There’s only the writing, which I admit to knowing very little about. But then it’s probably best not to know. It allows one to work without expectation. Best to let the poem do the thinking while we concern ourselves with what’s called the personal life.”
“ Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat hissweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;or the young woman who has set herself the task of scrapingher shadow off a wall.... Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chipsin her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was givento a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, whichsaddened his mother, that her son should be so lost invanity.... Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the manwho disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and fordessert served himself a chilled fedora.... ”