THE PROSE POEM:

AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

Volume 4 | 1995

Russell Edson’s The Tunnel:

Selected Poems
Morton Marcus

© Providence College

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 BOOK REVIEWS

Russell Edson. The Tunnel: Selected Poems. Field Poetry Series.

Oberlin College Press. 1994. 229 pp. Paper: $16.95

For the past thirty years, no one in American letters has been
identified more than Russell Edson with that continuously shape-
shifting form called, at various times, the new parable, the short-
short, and the prose poem. This is not to say that Edson has
proselytized the form, but that he has quietly yet persistently
explored its possibilities. If the results of his explorations prove his
importance in American literature, as The Tunnel: Selected Poems so
definitively shows, they also identify him as an iconoclast of the first
order.
The book contains a generous 171 poems chosen by the
author from seven volumes published between 1964 and 1985. They
are arranged chronologically, so one can, if one wants, seek patterns
of thematic concern as well as technical growth, although, except for
several elements to be discussed later, Edson's work has shown little
change over the years, as if he had achieved maturity of vision and
technique early on.
On the average, most of the poems run three-quarters of a
page in length (roughly between 150 and 350 words), and, in their
generally informal style, diction and overall structure, they most
often resemble newspaper "items," what used to be called "fillers" or
"boxes," which relate some arcane event or fragment of information
along the lines of "man bites dog."
But at their wildest, those items cannot approach Edson's
little narratives, since reading an Edson news item is like getting a
report from the land of the psyche, or the Republic of Dreams, as if
the newspaper for which he writes is printed for distribution on the
other side of the moon. In his reports, a man marries an automobile
("The Automobile"), an old woman about to bury her dead mop finds
that it's only fainted ("Charity"), a pet ape cannot convince his
master that he is innocent of spilling coffee on himself ("Ape and
Coffee"), and a dining room floats off into space ("The Abyss").
 Edson, of course, is no reporter, yet his approach to language
and to his dreamlike subjects often resembles a reporter's. The reader
should keep this paradoxical situation in mind, since it is this
reviewer's contention that Edson-as-iconoclast is primarily a breaker
of forms: he subconsciously gravitates to genres and sub-genres
(fairy tales, news items, etc.) whose conventions and structures set
up expectations in the reader which the poet then destroys or
satirizes.
Edson's short tales are rooted in riddles, conundrums,
gnomic sayings, puzzles and enigmas. He belongs to a tradition that
includes Kafka, Borges, Italo Calvino, Henri Michaux, the Sufi
poets, the makers of Zen koans, the old testament prophets, and even
Jesus. All of them used non-rational, short symbolic tales called
parables, which are chiefly conveyed through paradox and metaphor,
in order to give the incomprehensible at least a semblance of
meaning.
Edson, like several of those mentioned above, is the writer as
sleight-of-word trickster, the prestidigitator of the soul who pulls not
rabbits but meanings out of the darkness inside the hat we call the
universe. Magician, shaman, mystic, call him what you will—
through his words he brings us back to primal definitions we have
forgotten, so we can rediscover a wholeness of vision and sense of
self we have lost in our pursuit of material comforts and conscious-
deadening technologies.
Not surprisingly, Edson's most recurrent themes concern the
cycles of life, death and rebirth, the archetypal clash of the
generations, and the relationships within the nuclear family—all
made grotesque by their reflections in the fun-house mirrors of our
times and his vision. An interesting addendum to these themes is
Edson's poems on art and the artist, which progress from the daring
seeker of "The Lighted Window," who chases the elusive window
everywhere, through the prophetlike bringer of light of "The Intuitive
Journey," who is "changing the past by changing the future," to the
somber speaker of "The Sculptor," who knows that art is "less than
life, yet more than death...."
Edson's universe is our dark side. Ferociously funny as they
are frightening, his parables use psychology, philosophy and
mythology in portraying the shadowy side of the human condition.
The news items I talked about earlier are actually one of a dozen
forms he employs or parodies. Others include, primarily, folk-and
fairy-tales.
 Edson's parables, as outlandish as they seem at first, offer a
multitude of meanings and symbolic resonances. The already-
mentioned "Ape and Coffee" provides a good example of Edson's
method:

Some coffee had gotten on a man's ape. The man said, animal
did you get on my coffee?
No no, whistled the ape, the coffee got on me.
You're sure you didn't spill on my coffee? said the man.
Do I look like a liquid? peeped the ape.
Well you sure don't look human, said the man.
But that doesn't make me a fluid, twittered the ape.
Well I don't know what the hell you are, so just stop it, cried
the man.
I was just sitting here reading the newspaper when you
splashed the coffee all over me, piped the ape.
I don't care if you are a liquid, you just better stop splashing
on things, cried the man.
Do I look fluid to you? Take a good look, hooted the ape.
If you don't stop I'll put you in a cup, screamed the man.
I'm not a fluid, screeched the ape.
Stop it, stop it, screamed the man, you are frightening me.

The petty argument here between the ape and his master suggests the
inability of the master to see anything from another perspective, and
also suggests the I/Thou dichotomy that runs through so much of
Edson's work. At the same time, the victimization of the ape by his
master, another prevalent Edson theme, has both political overtones
and deeper resonances relating to evolution, since man and ape have
evolutionary connections. In addition, the dialogue between the two
characters parodies logical argument, showing the difficulty of
semantic and therefore philosophical discourse, and it follows the
theater of the absurd tradition, found particularly in the plays of
Ionesco, of demonstrating the meaningless of most conversation and
the inability of people to communicate.
Edson achieves this resonance by populating his parables
with archetypal human figures acting in the most commonplace
situations, namely domestic scenes. Living rooms, bedrooms,
kitchens, forests and meadows provide backdrops to his extraor-
dinary happenings, and the players in these events are, for the
most part, nameless, identified as man, woman, mothers and daugh-
ters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, old men and old women.
All these members of the basic family unit play their roles in Edson's
grotesque reflections of manners and metaphysics. At the same time,
Edson's use of twentieth century machinery for a good deal of his
images makes these folklike archetypes operate in a modern
environment which is as immediate as it is unsettling, such as in
"The Fight in the Meadow," where an aeroplane's propeller slices a
charging bull into short-ribs.
Animals are also assigned archetypal characters, recalling
their roles in fable. But many times Edson has them work against
their fabulist identities, thereby breaking our cliched identification
with them. He follows this practice with his human archetypes as
well, once more upsetting the reader's expectations and assumptions.
Such procedures continually surprise us by revealing a world we
have never seen before, free of expectations and assumptions, and
the inhibiting power of preconceived notions is a consistent target of
Edson's poetry.
One of the delights in reading Edson's outrageous parables is
the small touches that reside in each piece, the perfectly realized
details and images. When an old woman can't tell herself from the
porridge she eats, "her mind seems to float all over the room like a
puff of dust slapped out of a pillow" ("The Old Woman's Breakfast"),
and while canoeing upstairs, another Edson character encounters
"several salmon passing us...like the slippered feet of someone
falling down the stairs..." ("The Canoeing"). Many times these small
touches keep the shorter pieces from being merely clever ideas.
Another way these small touches operate is by acting in
opposition to Edson's supposed intentions. Many of the tales, for
example, are dialogues between archetypal figures engaging in
symbolic discourse. The atmosphere is heightened, the approach
stylized, the story usually generic, certainly not realistic. Yet time
and again Edson destroys his supposed intentions by making his
archetypes react to occurrences within the tale as if they were
ordinary people in everyday situations. In the fairytale "Old Folks,"
for example, an old woman continually asks her husband in a more
and more panicky voice if they are "safe," thereby giving the old
man—and Edson—the pretext for philosophizing on human destiny.
But Edson undercuts this grandiloquent opportunity by having the
old man, in a petty but very hu-
man manner, get exasperated at his wife's screaming.
Edson's use of the dialogue form is as integral to his method
as the parable itself. Not only does he use dialogues in almost three
quarters of his poems, but the subjects of his dialogues, as mundane
as they may seem at first, many times parody the structure and
language of philosophical debate and remind the reader of the
dialogue's illustrious history as a genre, going back to its Platonic
roots. Such a poem as "Of The Snake And The Horse," in both style
and tone, is a good example of these parodic dialogues, as is "The
Philosophers," with its comic testing of the I-think-therefore-I-am
postulate.
Edson also uses many different styles of speech in his
dialogues, demonstrating his excellent ear for spoken rhythms. In
"One Two Three, One Two Three," a hilariously exaggerated parable
built on a child's infantile desire to count and thereby order
everything he experiences, the language of the child's parents is
uneducated speech in diction, tense and syntax:

The old man said to his wife, will you make him stop
counting, because it's like having bugs crawling on
everything.
I can't, because he do it in his head where I can't make
him stop. He do it like in secret, said the old woman.

By the end of the poem, language, communication, and the family's

relationships have broken down, and the father, who was annoyed by
his son's incessant counting at the beginning, is being attacked by the
boy in a parody of the Oedipal conflict.
In "The Changeling," another father-son poem, the height-
ened language has biblical nuances:

...But should you allow time to embrace you to its

bosom of dust, that velvet sleep, then were you served even
beyond your need...

and the poem ends,

But then his son became his father.

Behold, the son is become as one of us, said the father.
His son said, behold, the son is become as one of us.
 Although most of Edson's pieces are narratives, and can
therefore with validity bear identification as parables, a number are
lyrical. The latter are usually based, as are many of the parables, on
extending outrageous metaphors to their zanily logical conclusions,
and fit the definition of conceits. The inventive initial comparisons,
which are "premises" in the narratives, are among the most
recognizable elements of Edson's art. This metaphorical approach
can be seen at work in such pieces as "The Ox," where a man
becomes the ox he metaphorically resembles in a manner reminiscent
of Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
Surprisingly, little has been written about Edson's artistry—
an artistry easily found in his mastery of language—and in the end, it
is a writer's mastery of language that satisfies the reader most. True,
Edson's grotesque visions and unexpected images are the most
spectacularly evident part of his art—as well as an integral part of
it—but they are brilliantly conveyed through "language." Readers
tend to forget that it is not the enthralling idea "but how the idea" is
put into words that creates the experience of literature for them. In
this connection, Edson's mastery of language cannot be stressed
enough, since "academic," and "purest" poets and literature
professors question the validity of the prose poem as a literary form,
seeing in it, possibly, a contradiction in terms. Considering the
richness of the scene and idea evoked in Edson's short pieces, his
work demonstrates a power of verbal compression few verse poets
can emulate, and, of course, compression is one of a poet's most
necessary technical prowesses— saying or implying the most in the
least amount of words, using language at its most efficient level.
The verse poet is guided by line, a central pulse off of which
he plays his various rhythms, whether he writes in closed-or free-
verse. The prose poet has abandoned the line as the basis of his art,
and has embraced the sentence in its place, replacing the stanza with
the paragraph. As in the verse poem, the prose poem's rhythms can
vary in intensity, can be songlike or spoken, pronounced or, dare the
word be used, prosy.
Edson is a master of the sentence. His strategy calls for
placing one sentence against another to achieve the complex rhythms
which he develops within the constructs of his paragraphs. Much of
the time, these paragraphs are straightforward in development. But
just as the reader is lulled into syntactical expectations, Edson
adds a verbal flourish, a discordant phrase, or a deliberately awkward
syntactical variation, so the reader is constantly reminded that
nothing, even the structure of Edson's language, is to be taken for
granted.
If this reviewer's preoccupation with linguistic matters seems
farfetched, the extensive number of poems in The Selected from
Edson's second volume, What A Man Can See (1969), justifies his
concern. What A Man Can See is Edson's most verbally experimental
book, and explores the basic concepts of grammar and usage. In
poem after poem, Edson seems intent on destroying the sentence and
then restructuring it, both syntactically and perceptually. At times he
seems to be employing collage techniques or Burroughs' cut-up
method, since he joins unrelated phrases and garbles syntax and
tense, so that the resultant non-sequiturs not only abound but suggest
unexpected meanings, as this fragment from "There Was"
demonstrates. In the poem, Edson scrambles and then rearranges the
words "man," "ceiling," "orange," "basket," "lobster," "house,"
"child," and "eats" in a number of variations, ending with

There was an eaten who was oranged by a child to

ceiling a please and a lobster that said basket when a house
was in a man.

Unlike the scientist dealing with matter identified by num-

bers, Edson is always aware that he is dealing with words that have
established definitions and connotations, and so he is shifting the
dimension of meaning in the reader's mind as he transposes sentence
elements. In the end, Edson must have found such experimentation
incompatible with his intentions, since he abandoned it after What A
Man Can See, although, as noted earlier, there are unique verbal
flourishes and unexpected usages throughout his work. Understand
that in all these cases Edson is not concerned with perception in the
epistemological sense, but in the more mundane area of learned
responses, those limiting conceptions both of prejudices, cliches, and
stereotypes—the unquestioning acceptance of social beliefs.
If Edson's verbal skills are evident in his compression, fine
ear for spoken rhythms, various tones of voice, and precise use of
figures of speech, it should always be remembered that he is saying
the unsayable, putting into words for the first time his
fantastic situations and images. This is a different matter than the
practices of "realistic" writers who try to describe the outside world
in terms of verisimilitude.
The only misgivings this reviewer has about The Selected
Poems is that it stops with a selection from The Wounded Breakfast,
which was published in 1985. Since then Edson has brought out at
least one more volume of prose poems, Tick Tock (Coffee House,
1992), and has published a number of poems, all of high quality, in
magazines and anthologies, and it would have been good to have
them represented in this volume. For even though his work has
shown a maturity of vision and approach from the start, Edson has
pursued a number of preoccupations and similarities of theme and
image in each book, particularly in the later volumes where his vision
has become darker, more apocalyptic.
But this is quibbling with an already generous volume, and
one whose design and layout enhance Edson's prose constructions.
The Field Poetry Series and the Oberlin College Press are to be
praised for making available this long overdue collection of Edson's
work which definitively shows him to be not only a consummate
artist, but one of the most original and provocative literary figures of
our time.

Morton Marcus