Nicholas Allen Harp

The Rooster’s Wife
Russell Edson
BOA Editions, $14.95 (paper)

8 Prose poems sometimes seem like the orphans of contemporary poetry, deprived of the credibility afforded to prose narrative and verse, and left to fend for themselves under such appellations as “fusion,” “fable,” and “poetic allegory.” The prose poem’s unbroken lines and inclination toward narrative and richly allusive metaphors afford it an ability to evade the formal expectations of verse while still attending to its intensely emotional and musical sensitivities. As David Lehman notes in his introduction to Great American Prose Poems (an essay at once illuminating and consternating to anyone looking for an understanding of the genre), “The prose poem is, you might say, poetry that disguises its true nature . . . It is a form that sets store by its use of the demotic, its willingness to locate the sources of poetry defiantly far from the spring on Mt. Helicon sacred to the muses. It is an insistently modern form. Some would argue further that it is . . . an inherently subversive one.”

Within this mercurial context of definition and deployment, acolytes of the prose poem have latched onto an important doyen in the poet Russell Edson. Edson is for American prose poetry what Roger Maris is for baseball: a humble but steady icon. He boasts more than 15 books, a career spanning more than 40 years, a reputation for shyness and modesty, a loyal European following, and a pleasantly reclusive Connecticut address. Working for decades primarily (though not exclusively) in the prose poem, Edson has built his own trademark hallucinatory narratives—short (usually not longer than a page), sparsely punctuated, mostly third-person tales with a kind of once-upon-a-time approachability (though they can be dense) and a startling, sensual, and often persuasive intimation of subconscious order. His fidelity to this style will perhaps fate him to a biographical subtitle (“Prose Poet”), but Edson’s work deserves to endure not just for its ingenuity of genre, but also on its own nervy merits. His poems attach the incongruous to the realistic; they juxtapose recognizable foundations of social reality with mysterious images of psychological tumult.

As a kind of surrealist’s initiation rite, Edson’s latest volume, The Rooster’s Wife, begins with “Fairytale,” an introductory piece appropriately concerned with origins and storytelling, and short enough to print here in its entirety:

      Behind every chicken is the story of a broken egg. And behind every broken egg is the story of a matron chicken. And behind every matron is another broken egg. . . .

      Out of the distance into the foreground they come, Hansels and Gretels dropping egg shells as they come. . . .

Like the famously imperiled children of old folk tales, the poem’s reader must use for his navigation the debris of beginnings. In fewer than 50 words, we also perceive the rupturing intensity of motherhood and, most importantly, the inevitable progression toward a narrative something—and a rather foreboding something at that.

Animals are regular inhabitants of Edson’s landscapes, as are unnamed “men,” “women,” “boys,” and “girls,” their generic identities smoothed over with definite and indefinite articles so as to suggest archetypes. In his mises en scène, Edson sketches his characters with minimal detail and furnishes them only with modest set pieces. This strategy evokes the likable plainness of good comic-strip artistry and allows the poems to launch headfirst into their stories without overture or ornament. Edson’s father Gus was himself a cartoonist, and he seems to have passed along a devotion to the direct visual. (Edson is an experienced painter in his own right, and he frequently contributes the cover art to his poetry volumes.) Rounding off each of these fantasy sketches are the poet’s signature concluding ellipses, which suggest that these poems are not meant to end so much as trail off into the ether of the subconscious. You could, in fact, view the entirety of Edson’s work as one long literary fever dream, his poems dissolving one into another through the decades in a Buñuelian montage.

Still, it seems imprudent to project too much allegorical import onto Edson’s poems because, to the extent that they’re symbolic, they symbolize in only suggestive and fleeting gestures. He is much more interested in plucking material from a fertile patch of the collective unconscious and seeing how it might dovetail with his own narrative logic. This ability to make the subconscious arrangement of images and musical language seem sensible is both Edson’s gift and his crutch. As soon as the reader finds himself ready to ask, in the spirit of the skeptic in the gallery of abstract-expressionist art, just what the hell this guy thinks he’s doing, he is liable to encounter a poem that stimulates some node in his own psychosymbolic order to produce an instinctual, if grudging, “OK.”

It is in this sense that The Rooster’s Wife represents Edson at his best, though perhaps not at his most innovative. What is interesting thematically about this volume is its special and repeated attention to domestic realms, especially those of parenthood and marriage. These are by no means new subjects for Edson (in a 40-year career, how could they be?), but they do supply the volume’s most vital and transfixing poems. In the exquisite “Evenings,” for example, a wife delightedly watches her husband dance with his dog, until

Suddenly she screams, Stop!
      What happened? cries her husband skidding to a stop; the dog fainting.
      I don’t know, she says, Suddenly everything’s reversed, now I don’t love sitting evenings watching them.
      Who?
      That man who dances with a dog; didn’t you see them? They were here just moments ago.

The poem proceeds with another spry reversal as the wife rediscovers her joy, steeped though it remains in incomprehension. This marital amnesia, the wife snapping in and out of her affection, is simultaneously comic, critical, and moving. The poem revels in the cyclical REM state of spousal fidelity and rote; the “evenings” here evoke not only twilight in a domestic household but also the balancing act of marriage, a moving back and forth between devotion and vacancy that makes enduring love and enduring delirium somehow even, and perhaps necessarily concomitant.

Many of these matrimonial poems seem intent on yoking marriage to a similar seriocomic antagonism. They rely on a moment of subtle discord, of domestic obligations failing to serve their blissful intentions. “Breakfast Toast” finds a wife repeatedly biting into her husband’s hand after buttering it like bread. In “The Elegant Simplification,” a husband seeks a doctor’s help to repair the cane he uses to beat his wife: “Her head,” he says, “is uncommonly hard.” And then there’s “Baby,” which imagines a mother giving birth “to a little girl’s doll.” Despite this surprise, the parents decide to care for the doll like a real child, diapering it and giving it “an empty baby bottle to nurse. And life is good.” In the final verse-paragraph, however, a problem arises:

      But one day the baby begins to make a ticking sound. They call the bomb squad, and the baby is put in an explosives cage and taken to a deserted field, and blown-up. . . .

End of poem. Though these sorts of lines clearly shoot for black comedy (again, cartoons come to mind), it is hard not to feel repulsed by some of their insistently noisome and hostile gestures. While it’s true that comedy depends on the violent and the serious, Edson’s wit sometimes seems too reliant on the grim punch line, the hollow smack in the face.

Longing and confusion connect again in the volume’s final, title poem. “The Rooster’s Wife” imagines a speaker falling asleep in a hen’s nest. He then dreams of being confronted by the bird’s rooster-husband, to whom he offers the following explanation:

Please, your highness (I dreamed myself replying), I’m trying to be incubated. Another hen laid me, but I never hatched. Then seeing the possibility of your wife’s bosom, without I promise being moved by the slightest erotic possibility inherent in such fullness of breast; nor, might I mention, that cunning little bow of a beak, the sharp, sweet kisses promised therein—I sought only remedy for an unhatchedness. . . .

These lines surprise with their uncharacteristically diffuse, windy syntax and self-consciously rococo diction, which takes over only after Edson puts his speaker to bed: it’s Edson’s dream talk. In the folded layers of sleep, Edson’s speaker allows his language to unspool from its usual frank (even brazen) delivery. And it is only proper that a “matron chicken” and her eggs end the same volume that begins with their quasi-fairy-tale origins. The speaker’s dream produces a hilarious regression, a zany yearning for the relief of completion and delivery. Finally, the speaker tells us, “And then I dreamed I dreamed no more. . . .” Unreleased from sleep’s incubation, Edson’s speaker remains wrapped in the insulated shell of the subconscious, a sleeper who might best escape his dream life in his dreams.

The sheer number of poems, and their brevity, make The Rooster’s Wife by turns bawdy, laugh-out-loud funny, magnificent, and instantly forgettable. The best poems here work autonomously; their force creates an experience so unusual and evocative as to suck all other reality out of the room. Occasionally, though, Edson’s poems rely too much on the consistency of their creator’s method, working less as independent utterances than as conventional features in the poet’s familiar (and admittedly virtuoso) corpus. Reading these poems is a bit like listening to a favorite rock band’s session reels: one’s affection for the music must stand up to the challenge of hearing the same riffs and licks repeatedly, as one hopes for some exciting variation in style or substance that would mark the performance a classic. <

Nicholas Allen Harp's poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A 2003 Fulbright Fellow in Ireland, he is currently a lecturer in English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Originally published in the summer 2005 issue of Boston Review