Russell Edson

Today's feature: Russell Edson (1935 - ), a man once known as the "Gary Larson" of poetry, for his frequent use of animals in his prose poems, and his fantastic sense of the absurd. I went to a reading he gave at Penn State when I in State College in the late '80s, and I had to wonder how many drinks he'd had before he showed up that evening. His reading went something like this, just to take a typical poem of his:

The Death of a Fly

There was once [sip water] a man who [take drag on cigarette] disguised himself [sip water] as a
housefly [cigarette] and went about the neighborhood [sip water] depositing
flyspecks.
Well,[sip water] he has to do something hasn't he? said someone [sip water, cigarette]
to someone else.

There's more to the poem, but you get the idea: both of his poetic style, and his reading style. Or at least, that's what I thought of his reading style until recently. My opinion was thankfully changed when I was looking for one poem, and came across this one instead, beautifully illustrated by Jeffrey Brown:



And to dispell the notion that he's poetry's Gary Larson, here's this poem, illustrated by Jeffrey Brown:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/images/ofmemory.gif

Larson is justifiably a great cartoonist: his absurdist sensibility had fans cracking up every morning over their coffee and cereal when they turned to the comics page. But Edson isn't trying to make us laugh: he's trying to make us think, and feel, as every good poet does. The multiple layers of meaning in "Of Memory and Distance," in the collaboration of Edson and Brown, is now of my favorite Edson poems, and perhaps because of a personal perspective. At a certain point in our lives, we begin to lose the people close to us. How do we remember them? With photographs, yes, but more importantly, with the stories we tell about them:
"But then there is fiction, so that one is never really sure if it was someone who vanished into the end of seeing, or someone made of paper and ink..."

Did I mention that Edson's father was a cartoonist, and that Edson himself went to art school before turning to poetry? So marrying the cartoon and comic strip to his wonderfully bizarre, yet affecting poems, is more than appropriate.