Edson is not merely an offbeat original but a profound contemporary poet deserving of wider recognition.
Russell Edson (1935- ) is an author highly regarded for his work with the prose poem. He’s received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and he National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Connecticut with his wife.
The Falling Sickness, Russell Edson’s first collection of short plays, will be welcomed by the extensive and devoted readership he has gathered over the years. His turn to the theater reveals a new dimension in his work, a vein of dramatic satire that makes all the more vivid the nightmarish absurdities which underscore so much in our lives. As in his earlier books of illustrated fables, parables, and prose poems, the scale of events is small, though the decibel level is shatteringly high: in each of the four plays, the bewildering wail of a nuclear family giving vent to its pain. If Edson’s microcosm seems unredeemable, it does after all exist in response to the greater world at large, and like the canvases of an Hieronymus Bosch, reveals the secret madnesses at its heart.
In her introduction to this remarkable book if fables and drawings, Denise Levertov describes Russel Edson as “one of those originals who appear out of the lonesomeness of a vast, throned country to create a peculiar and defined world . . . a world seen as through the wrong end of a spyglass, miniscule but singularly clear.” “Fable” is really too narrow a term for Russel Edsons’s writing. His brief, tightly-packed, highly-charged paragraphs are the crystallized essence of what could be long stories, and they are prose poems. They are nutshell commentaries on the human condition (“at times wildly funny, as if King Lear had been written and illustrated by Edward Lear”) and they are ontological probings into the nature of things: objects, animals, people. “Edson’s mode,” Miss Levertov writes, “is detached, oblique, austere. He is able to pass without loss of grace from the hilarious to a kind of dark gothick beauty, and sometimes to a tenderness that reveals him as no cruel puppetmaster but the anguished beholder of inexplicable cruelties. His art – its syntax, its elegant dryness, its bizarre condensed events – is the unique outgrowth of an eccentric imagination, the convoluted shell of the mind’s hypersensitive, clairvoyant snail.” Edson’s line drawings are not specific illustrations to his tales, but a kind of contrasting commentary, or obbligato to them.
Edson is not merely an offbeat original but a profound contemporary poet deserving of wider recognition.
Russell Edson must be considered a major force in American poetry. It’s long past time that Edson’s underground following came to the surface, so we can give this poet the serious attention his work merits.
