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Other American poets of Edson's now almost elderly generation have written and still write prose poems, but Edson has written precious little else. Perhaps his persistence accounts for him being the only American prose poet most readers can recall. Or perhaps his memorability stems from his reliability as a surrealist. Surrealism seems the literary manner best suited for prose poetry; others more readily make fables and mere story ideas, rather than poems, out of short prose pieces. Edson is a perpetual font of the incongruous scenarios, wordplay, and repetitive narrative and conversational forms typical of dreams, and dreams, after all, are the model surrealist texts. Like dreams, Edson's prose poems are directly and indirectly concerned with feelings customarily suppressed during wakefulness, whose content is violent, scatological, and, especially, sexual. An Edson prose poem, however amusing and ridiculous--however jokelike--it may be, is disturbing. The line between acceptable and forbidden appetites is definitely skirted. Laughter never blunts the edges of Edson's elegantly maculate conceptions. Ray Olson
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Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
