Two Poems
The Fall There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding themout saying to his parents that he was a tree. To which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the livingroomas your roots may ruin the carpet. He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves. But his parents said look it is fall. Antimatter On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world, where the insane gosane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love. And in the evening the sun is just rising. Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs themof their pleasure. In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy ...
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- November 10, 2022
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“Two Poems” from LITTLE MR. PROSE POEM: SELECTED POEMS OF RUSSELL EDSON: by Russell Edson.
(First Appeared in the book, THE TUNNEL: SELECTED POEMS, Published by Oberlin College Press in 1994.)
Published by BOA Editions on October 25, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Russell Edson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Russell Edson (1935-2014) was the author of many books of prose poems, including The Very Thing That Happens, The Reason Why the Closet Man ls Never Sad, The Rooster’s Wife, and See Jack. He is also the author of a collection of plays, The Falling Sickness, and the novels Gulping’s Recital and The Song of Percival Peacock. He lived in Darien, Connecticut.
“Anyone who was fortunate to hear Edson read his poems is not likely to have forgotten the experience. He made his audiences roar with laughter or sit astonished at what they were hearing…the real surprise comes when we realize that despite all the joking we are reading or listening to, these are not the scribblings of a village idiot, but of a comic genius and a serious thinker.”
— Charles Simic, from The Foreword
“Edson’s poems are deranged, oracular, logical, ecstatic, pellucid, desperate, filthy, fathomless, and deceptively simple. When I gave a reading with Edson in 2003 I said, ‘Tonight I am reading with one of my greatest heroes.’ He’s still here with me, always, like a god.”
— Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments
“Edson permitted himself to have it both ways, to write prose that reverses — each of his sentences simultaneously urges the reader forward into the action of Edson’s stories in miniature and also pulls the reader backward. Musical language, artfully loaded words, subtle twists in the plot, and all sorts of meaningful misdirections in Edson’s work demand that we reread, that we never quite finish reading any of these poems, which are ever in the midst of revising themselves.”
— Craig Morgan Teicher, from The Afterword
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