One Art

BY PROF. VAROL AKMAN

Russell Edson
"One has to remember that words are the enemy of creative writing. The ideal is to try not to write too much beyond the English articles, a, an, the."

Broadly recognized as the most gifted living prose poet, Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935. His father was an accomplished cartoonist. At 16, Edson was admitted on scholarship to the Art Students League and began publishing in the 1960s. The Very Thing That Happens (1964) was the work that first brought him critical attention. He has since continued to bring out many volumes of poems and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. To The American Poetry Anthology (1975), edited by Daniel Halpern, Edson contributed the following in lieu of a short bio: "The only thing worth saying about the author, in my view, is what he has given to be public, all the rest being the generalized personal, which is mere confusion and finally dust."

Edson - forever modest and somewhat reclusive by temperament - calls himself "Little Mr. Prose Poem." Donald Hall, a fellow Connecticuter and the Library of Congress's fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, has characterized Edson's work thus in a 1977 American Poetry Review article: "Few people have ever written as Edson does, out of a whole irrational universe - infantile, paranoiac - with its own small curved space complete to itself, impenetrable by other conditions of thought."

Edson's collections of poetry include The Childhood of an Equestrian (1973), The Clam Theater (1973), The Intuitive Journey and Other Works (1976), The Reason Why the Closet-Man Is Never Sad (1977), With Sincerest Regrets (1980), The Wounded Breakfast (1985), The Tormented Mirror (2001), The Rooster's Wife (2005), and See Jack (2009). In 1994, Oberlin College Press published The Tunnel, his selected poems.

"The Neighborhood Dog" perhaps needs little in way of introduction on a campus such as ours where there are scores of adorable dogs, stray or otherwise. This house, traditionally a place for tranquil and harmony, may soon host a Kafkaesque crime; it has potential to turn into the appalling site of a butchery. (Then again you have to read the entire poem.) No doubt Edson is a "political" poet deep down, revealing the bizarre, wicked roots of our communal and cultural conduct and offering a miniature philosophy of violence, if you will.

The Neighborhood Dog

A neighborhood dog is climbing up the side of a house.

I don't like to see that, I don't like to see a dog like that, says someone passing in the neighborhood.

The dog seems to be making for that 2nd story window. Maybe he wants to get his paws on the sill; he may want to hang there and rest; his tongue throbbing from his open mouth.

Yet, in the room attached to that window (the one just mentioned) a woman is looking at a cedar box; this is of course where she keeps her hatchet; in that same box, the one in this room, the one she is looking at.

That person passing in the neighborhood says, that dog is making for that 2nd story window. . . .  This is a nice neighborhood, that dog is wrong.

If the dog gets his paws on the sill of the window, which is attached to the same room where the woman is opening her hatchet box, she may chop at his paws with that same hatchet. She might want to chop at something; it is, after all, getting close to chopping time . . .

Something is dreadful, I feel a sense of dread, says that same person passing in the neighborhood, it's that dog that's not right, not that way . . .
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