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Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Feb 02, Glenn Russell rated it it was amazing. Here are four of my favorite Russell Edson pieces from this collection that I've read over and over and over again. Somewhat in the same spirit, at the very bottom is my own micro-fiction I had published some years back. His wife appears in the doorway with a candle and asks, how does it go?
Not now, not now, I'm just getting to the lining, he murmurs with impatience. I just wanted to know if you found any blood clots? Blood Here are four of my favorite Russell Edson pieces from this collection that I've read over and over and over again. Blood clots? For my necklace. See how the fedoras along the shelf are the several skulls of my father, in this catacomb of my family. A handful of shingles they hold, leafing through them like the pages of our lives; the book of the roof: here is the legend of the moss and the weather, and here the story of the overturned ship, sunken, barnacled by the markings of birds.
We are to be led away, one by one, through the darkness of sleep, through the mica glitter of stars, down the stairways of our beds, into the roots of trees. The chimpanzee starts shrieking and tries desperately to get out. By that time, though, the man has pulled the shower curtain closed and punches at the outline of the chimp through the cloth.
The door creeks open. Alarmed, the man twists around and sees another chimpanzee lope in; outnumbered he bolts. Now his eyes really bulge, his naked flesh trembles. The hallway is full of chimpanzees. And when the chimps gander at his horrified face, they all start jumping up and down, baring their teeth, creating a din with their high-pitched screeching.
Surging forward, flailing his arms like an over-wound windup toy, the man takes a running leap toward the stairs leading down to the parlor where his wife is hosting afternoon tea.
The chimps clutch at him with their hairy arms, and when he tumbles down the stairs, no less than seven chimps tumble with him. The mass of hair, teeth, penises, tails and white sweaty flanks crash at the foot of the stairs. The ladies glance over from their tea for a moment and continue their conversation.
Untangling themselves, the embarrassed chimps race out the back door and are followed quickly by their fellows who stampede down the stairs, trample the man's legs, and head on the way.
The man ceremoniously picks himself up, bows to the ladies, executes a left face, and marches back up the stairs and into the bathroom. Clutching the soap with a burly hand, he proceeds to scrub himself. Just when he's about to reach for the shampoo, the first chimp vaults back into the tub.
Hastily, the man snatches him up by the neck and tail, sprints to the head of the stairs, and flings the chimp airborne to the bottom. He stomps back to the bathroom that by this time has really steamed up. There's a wet bar of soap on the floor - his foot hits it. He takes a nasty fall.
Unable to get up, he writhes in pain on the white hexagonal tiles. Meanwhile, all the chimps come rumbling back up the stairs, trample over his belly, and pile into the tub.
The man splutters pleas for help, but his voice is drowned out by all the whooping. Sep 01, Matthew Mousseau rated it really liked it Shelves: short-stories , poetry , surreal-dada. This is the house of the closet-man. There are no rooms, just hallways and closets.
Things happen in rooms. He does not like things to happen. Closets, you take things out of closets, you put things into closets, and nothing happens. Why do you have such a strange house? I am the closet-man, I am either going or coming, and I am never sad. But why do you have such a strange house? I am never sad. How best to summarize Edson's approach to prose poetry? His imagery, his absurdity, his departure from logical coherence His obsessions such as animals, decapitation, and the transformation of something natural into something mechanical or man-made , which he returns to frequently in The Reason Why the Closet-Man Is Never Sad as much as in his previous collections There was a man who made things because he was lonely.
And so he made tears, which he thinks are tiny examples of the mystery that is large enough at times to swallow whole ships, and to be the road of the great whales. The man makes tears which he thinks come out of his eyes from the memory of ponds and oceans.
And he thinks they are the tears of a marionette whose head is a jug of water with a sad face painted on it. Aunt Hobbling in her kitchen making a small bu shapely breakfast turns and smiles in such a way as to make us aware of the constant space that surrounds her, embracing her, among those things of constant use, things that have become a king of body music, echoed in the natural sounds of the forest, and in the faint thunders of the distant sky. She thinks of the finery scarred; rough seductions, as though one could collect a wealth made ugly by breaking through locked doors to those small bu shapely interiors.
One's feelings numbed now by that inner awareness of all the outward shows of all those small but shapely mercies. Yet, in the meantime, the dew, like small glass beads, aligns itself with the sun to make those small but shapely pieces in the grass of what we take to be the purity of light.
She floats, suddenly enlightened, like a Kleenex in the wild. Meanwhile, we return once more to the kitchen of Aunt Hobbling, where she turns once more, smiling. He wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture for them.
And, to my amazement, the lines were free from the self-congratulation that Wallace Stevens warned against when he wrote Be thou the voice, not you. You could do that? And gentleness is a trait seldom found in antirealistic work—work which, in its worst forms, sets up stumbling blocks in front of sense to create the semblance of difficulty, and makes the reader into a befuddled detective.
Edson was born in Connecticut in and lives there unpretentiously with his wife, Frances. Since , he has published eleven collections of prose poems, a collection of plays, two novels, and countless chapbooks. Many of these are out of print and hard to find even from the most reliable rare-book vendors. I find myself doing it all the time. You need to describe impossible landscapes and situations using simple, precise language and a reasoning tone.
You need to be able to describe a man marrying a shoe, a woman serving ape to her husband, and a man who convinces his parents he has become a tree but cannot convince them he was lying. Surrealism, right? Well, not exactly. Verse and prose are the real antonyms….
Prose without the poetry is familiar territory. It is, in the end, much like pornography: we know it when we see it. Sentences, paragraphs, and other prose ingredients, not to mention the parts of speech, behave according to a standardized set of rules.
These rules ensure our making sense of any piece of prose, assuming our ability to make sense of prose in general. We assume explicable sense. At barest minimum, we assume the prose text to have a subject and for that subject to be identifiable. In reading prose, we anticipate the experience of moving from a position of lesser understanding to a position of greater understanding—if not of the subject qua subject, then at least of the way the text introduces and explains that subject.
Prose poems, undecodable by the conventional logic of prose, deliberately fail to meet our expectations of prose.
In prose poetry the prose form does not necessarily give rise to a linear accumulation of meaning. They promise prose but botch the delivery. Instead of a gradual accumulation of meaning, they offer an aggregation of meaning. In other words, different discursive threads may run alongside one another in the text of a prose poem, beginning and ending and connecting in unconventional places, or failing to connect altogether.
These techniques encompass the ways in which prose poems fail at being prose—and, thus, succeed at being poems. In other words, they need not begin at a position of mystery or obscurity and gradually yield sense, but might vacillate between sense and obscurity as the poem unfolds.
Thus, the physical end of the prose poem need not be the physical locus of most sense, just as the physical beginning need not be the locus of most obscurity. Prose poems are antiprosaic prose. Though accessible, his craft is not easy to execute. As he says to Johnson:.
A piece of writing must not only have the logic of language, but the logic of composition.
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