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FIELD – Fall 2015

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Number 93

Fall 2015

Biannual

Valerie Wieland

Just over one third of the fall issue of FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics is dedicated to a symposium on Russell Edson, a strikingly original poet, playwright, novelist and illustrator who died in 2014. Born in 1935, Edson studied art as a teen, then began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His corpus of work, in addition to numerous books of poetry, includes a book of plays, two novels, and the much-cited 1975 essay, “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems.” In fact, The Poetry Foundation has referred to Edson as the “godfather of the prose poem in America.” In tribute, several contemporary writers each comment on a different Edson poem. Just over one third of the fall issue of FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics is dedicated to a symposium on Russell Edson, a strikingly original poet, playwright, novelist and illustrator who died in 2014. Born in 1935, Edson studied art as a teen, then began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His corpus of work, in addition to numerous books of poetry, includes a book of plays, two novels, and the much-cited 1975 essay, “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems.” In fact, The Poetry Foundation has referred to Edson as the “godfather of the prose poem in America.” In tribute, several contemporary writers each comment on a different Edson poem.

Lee Upton chose “Counting Sheep,” in which Edson wrote:

A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He
wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture
for them.
They are like grains of rice.
[ . . . ]
He wonders if they could be used as a substitute
for rice, a sort of woolly rice . . .
[ . . . ]
He puts them under a microscope, and falls asleep
counting them . . . 

Upton, in her brief essay, decides to imitate Edson’s style and realizes her attempts at imitation fail.

Dennis Schmitz takes on Edson’s “The Ox:” “There was once a woman whose father over / the years had become an ox. // She would hear him alone at night lowing / in his room.” Schmitz writes about Edson’s love of “the physical, the indecent, the icky.” What’s more, “The content, of course, is outrageous. But you go along. [ . . . ] What writer is more delightfully goofy?”

Pulitzer Prize winner and 2007 U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic, in “Easy as Pie,” turns the reader’s attention to a couple of Edson’s more lyrical poems. “The Lighted Window” begins, “A lighted window floats through the night / like a piece of paper in the wind.” “The Pilot,” also starting window-centric, shows us:

Up in a dirty window in a dark room is a star
which an old man can see. He looks at it. He can
see it. It is the star of the room; an electrical
freckle that has fallen out of his head and gotten
stuck in the dirt on the window. 

Simic, who knew and has previously written about Edson, comments: “Though it too begins with an image and the confusion whether what the narrator is seeing is a star in a dirty window or speck of light that had escaped his head, it pursues the comic possibilities of the situation not just more interestingly but with a greater dramatic effect. Despite some funny stuff, this is a somber and heartbreaking poem.” Even in the more lyrical and serious poetry, his ‘delightful goofiness’ shines through, making it markedly Edson’s.

To cement Edson’s quirky, often surrealistic style in your mind, “Let Us Consider” opens this way:

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 . . . . 

Being introduced to Edson is reason alone to seek out this issue of FIELD, but don’t let the tributes stop you short of reading the expressive poems that follow.

Ralph Burns, who won the FIELD Poetry Prize in 2000, has two poems, both among my best-liked. “Speeding Ticket” begins with a play on words: “I was trying to outrun a funeral I told the officer.” The man in the poem heard

[ . . . ] Hammond organ oiled
and ready to go with strains of how He
walks with you, not the one in the boat,
the one in the car black as night’s eye. 

“Road Trip,” in which Burns refers to cows looking past everything, could be a follow-up:

I thought I saw what they see but that
was someone looking back when I was feeling
grass poke me in the back outside the Tulsa
County Fairgrounds just after I’d
gone through the windshield. 

Among other superb works is Elizabeth Gold’s “Dementia” as she examines the act of forgetting: “Maybe the world has it. How quickly / it forgot streetcars and the passenger / pigeon as if they never were:” Also forgotten, “a joke a traveler / told in the pinwheel shade of a palm tree:”

Hilary S. Jacqmin shows us strong imagery in “Atomograd Atom City, Ukraine” a Ferris wheel against the horizon and the late Karl Krolow, in “A Sentence,” translated from German by Stuart Friebert, makes astute points:

A sentence never knows
what will happen with it.
[ . . . ] A mishap of grammar
is an adventure
like fragile classics. 

It’s obvious this volume slants toward poets no longer with us. A prose poem by deceased French poet René Char titled “Artine,” translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson and first published in 1934, is also featured. But in juxtaposing earlier poetry with what’s new and exciting, FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics has assembled for today’s readers an ideal literary escape from the everyday busyness of life.
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