Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics hosted one of the panels at AWP that I was unwilling to miss–a tribute to Russell Edson, the wonderfully irreverent poet working almost exclusively in prose-poems. (I will refer to him only as some sort of notorious Saxon from the dark ages: Edson the lewd, Edson the forgivable, Edson the maker of great abs for all the laughing you will be doing from reading his poems, Edson the phenomena without end.) And he is notorious for his inventions in the same way Robin Hood was for his crimes–it all depends on your vantage whether you think him more on the hero side, or more as outlaw. Here’s my vote for Edson the hero, and I’m indebted to Charles Simic’s remarks as a panelist for helping me think about this: Edson’s work puts comedy in the same distinct circle of high cultural import as tragedy, if not above it. We are clearly better for this, even if Edson will never be the Poet Laureate. Comedy need not be polarizing in our poetics–and the more I think about Edson, his work, and hearing him read, the more I admire his continued insistence, book after book, that comedy is just as important a poetic mode of operating as tragedy, just as apparent in our everyday lives and interactions as the spectrum of tiny and not so tiny tragedies: the coffee on my shirt, the ambulance flying past taking someone to get help who needs it, the major opportunity now passed, now acting like an octopus in a tank. I suppose tragedies happen in Edson’s poems too, but I bet–and the laboratory of an AWP panel audience proved this–people only cry because they can’t stop laughing.
What does this mean? Edson operates, even with the high-profile supporters around him at this particular recent panel (James Tate, Simic, and Robert Bly), in the margins. And while the mainstream may prefer a poetry that feels more rarefied, precious, and noble, I advocate space for Edson, the humanist. We need his poems, and we need what they teach us–that comedy in poetry shouldn’t be a ticket to the ghetto of the margins, but rather recognized for what it is–a tool that permits us to delight in the emotive force of a poem.
Roethke, a poet I will always love, famously said in a famous poem that we think by feeling. I like to think this is why we are so good at making mistakes. If writers of great consequence make pieces of writing that produce feelings in a reader, feelings that in turn help us think about the world–then Edson the Populist is worthy your readerly attention. He teaches us to prioritize delight. Humor is not esoteric, and they way Edson does it, is not elitist. He’s a great poet of the people. Could I read all Edson, all the time? No way. But I could absolutely stand to read more of him, and so could my abs.