Russell Edson (placeholder)

Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935 and currently resides there with his wife Frances. Edson, who jokingly has called himself “Little Mr. Prose Poem,” is inarguably the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable. In a forthcoming study of the American prose poem, Michel Delville suggests that one of Edson’s typical “recipes” for his prose poems involves a modern everyman who suddenly tumbles into an alternative reality in which he loses control over himself, sometimes to the point of being irremediably absorbed—both figuratively and literally—by his immediate and, most often, domestic everyday environment. . . . Constantly fusing and confusing the banal and the bizarre, Edson delights in having a seemingly innocuous situation undergo the most unlikely and uncanny metamorphoses. . . .

Reclusive by nature, Edson has still managed to publish eleven books of prose poems and one novel, The Song of Percival Peacock (available from Coffee House Press). All of the following poems included in this personal website collection, except for “Sleep,” “Accidents,” “The Death of a Fly,” and “Balls,” are from The Tunnel: Selected Poems (Field Editions, Oberlin College Press).
from: http://www.webdelsol.com/LITARTS/edson/

 

Recent stories by and about Russell Edson

Why I admire Russell Edson

Mr Brain was a hermit dwarf who liked to eat shellfish off
the moon. He liked to go into a tree then because there is a
little height to see a little further, which may reveal now the
stone, a pebble—it is a twig, it is nothing under the moon that
you can make sure of.
So Mr Brain opened his mouth to let a moonbeam into his head.

Why to be alone, and you invite the stars to tea. A cup of
tea drinks a luminous guest.

In the winter could you sit quietly by the window, in the
evening when you could have vinegar and pretend it to be
wine, because you would do well to eat doughnuts and
pretend you drink wine as you sit quietly by the window. You
may kick your leg back and forth. You may have a tendency
to not want to look there too long and turn to find darkness in
the room because it had become nighttime.

Why to be alone. You are pretty are you not/you are as
pretty as you are not, or does that make sense.
You are not pretty, that is how you can be alone. And
then you are pretty like fungus and alga, you are no one
without some one, in theory alone.

Be good enough to go to bed so you can not think too
much longer.

mr brain by russell edson


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