Russell Edson
Called the “godfather of the prose poem in America,” Russell Edson’s idiosyncratic body of work is populated with strange and intriguing figures: a woman fights a tree, a mother serves ape; in the poem “Let Us Consider,” there’s a “farmer who makes his straw hat his sweetheart” and an “old woman who makes a floor lamp her son.” The poems are surreal and fablelike, sometimes resembling brief plays. Donald Hall said of Edson’s poetry, “It’s fanciful, it’s even funny—but his humor carries discomfort with it, like all serious humor.” And Peter Schejeldahl pointed out that his poems have “the sustained wackiness of old Warner Brothers cartoons.”
CPC Readings
Friday, May 14, 1976
with Charles Simic
Museum of Contemporary Art
Poetry by Russell Edson
Some students were stretching a professor on a medieval torture rack. He had offered himself to show them how an academic might be stretched beyond his wildest dreams like a piece of chewing gum.
And as they turned the wheel the professor was getting longer and longer.
Don’t make me too long, or I’ll look kind of goofy, sighed the professor as he grew longer and longer.
Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall….