April 16, 2001
To echo Mark Twain's famous warning to his readers, attempting to locate a motive, moral or plot in any of these 73 miniature narrative poems is ill-advised. "The Babies" begins: "He wanted to know what she had in her blouse that heaved so nicely when she moved./ My babies, she said as she opened her blouse and showed him her breasts." The poem does not develop much further, and the rest of the work here pointedly does not boast much more sophistication. Like carnival mirrors in which images are distorted and exaggerated for low entertainment, the images they reflect are vulgar—and most often sexist: "The Flower Pot" asks "wouldn't the nice gentleman like to drop a seed or two into an old lady's flowerpot?"; "Night Song" clarifies the fact that "If mice are interested in human hair it is the hair found at the lower end of a woman's torso. They love the idea of secret passageways." When the circus actually does come to town, it's an occasion for remembering how "the last time... it left a fat lady dumped on the sidewalk like a pile of varicose cottage cheese wearing lingerie." None of this is a departure for Edson, who, in over 12 small-press books of similar vignettes (selected by Oberlin in The Tunnel) and a novel (The Song of Percival Peacock, from Coffee House), has taken Ivy Compton-Burnett–style domestic strife and banter further than most might care to go. The amount of ironic violence on these pages is indeed startling; as Pauline Kael once said of Billy Wilder's movies, these poems "pull out laughs the way a catheter draws urine."
March 15, 2001
With 10 previous collections to his credit, Edson is the godfather of the prose poem in America. His work sets a standard for prose poetry that few other practitioners can meet. Most of them don't try, telling anecdotes and offering aesthetic and ethical musings in their prose poems instead of practicing the pure surrealism that is Edson's forte. An Edson prose poem proceeds like a joke, beginning with an odd situation ("Things that look like woodwinds flood the fields," for instance, or "An old man began to lay eggs"), developing with skewed logic, and concluding with some kind of surprise. But Edson's jokes are dreamier than any stand-up comic's, full of sexual and scatological twists and weird metamorphoses. They can elicit laughter, disgust, or both simultaneously, and they defy easy interpretation, for they lack overt symbolism. They are as disturbing but often, especially in this book, as dazzling as a good Dali or De Chirico painting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)