Russell Edson and the Dream Brain

Extraordinary poet

I first learned of his strangely bizarre prose poems from poet Stephen Dunn in a workshop at Cranbrook in Michigan. Dunn said that Edson’s book, THE TUNNEL: Selected Poems, was all about fucking. The entire book. Every single poem. So, of course, I had to buy the book. I imagine everyone in the workshop ran out to buy the book. I don’t necessarily disagree with Dunn, because I suppose any poem could be interpreted as being about sex or death, but beyond that, I embraced Edson’s work. It’s both dreamy and shocking. After reading one of his poems you might feel exhilarated or slightly groggy, as if you were awakened too soon from your afternoon nap.

Of his writing process, Edson said, “My job as a writer is mainly to edit the creative rush. The dream brain is the creative engine… I sit down to write with a blank page and a blank mind. Wherever the organ of reality (the brain) wants to go I follow with the blue-pencil of consciousness.” 

I would have loved to have had a chance to talk to him.  I was saddened to read that this poet extraordinaire Russell Edson passed away April 29, 2014 with barely a blip in the news.

My poem dedicated to Edson:

RUSSELL EDSON’S MATTER

Maybe he doesn’t like that think too hard because it’s more fun to believe that a head might be used to house tropical fish. I see him at his desk. He tries not to think about sex. He is about to write the word ape on a piece of paper when his dog  barks to be let out. The dog is about to leave a package on the carpet which will make his wife angry. Surprises are best when the come from Russell, but then again, I never had a toilet slide into my living room and demand to be loved.

I wonder what his childhood was like. No one else writes about mothers who line the shelf with the many skulls of father, men who marry shoes and spy on them when they pee or say that the porridge on the table longs for the ceiling, dreaming of new plasticities.

I wonder because I have days when I’m swimming through the rooms in my house as it sits upside down. I breast stroke light fixtures, somersault over doorway arches and practice my dead-man float in the blue lake of the living room.

I have days when pink nodules like mushrooms or snail antennae grow from my scalp in meat rows like plugs on a doll’s head. I don’t mow how to comb it. Then a bald man looks at me and the slit on his head says, “Yes, I know what this is. There is nothing you can do for it.” So I sit at my desk and try not to think and in the end there was only an arrangement of words, and still, no matter…

Published by March Street Press ©2003 Linda K Sienkiewicz

Linda K. Sienkiewicz is the author of the award-winning novel In the Context of Love, a story about one woman’s need to tell the truth without shame.

2016 Sarton Women’s Fiction Finalist
2016 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist
2016 Readers’ Favorite Finalist
2016 USA Book News Best Book Finalist
2015 Great Midwest Book Fest Honorable Mention.

“…at once a love story, a cautionary tale, and an inspirational journey.” ~ Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of National Book Award Finalist, American Salvage, and critically acclaimed Once Upon a River,and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters