Achille's Heel

America TeSBT Tursi continuedfrom previous page is the land of physical understandings. Its language is a language ofimages. Poetry is a physical art without a physical presence, so that it often finds itself in cadence to the heartbeat, the thud ofdays, and in the childish grasp of the reality of rhymes. Why didn't he pursue visual arts as seriously as poetry then? He writes, "Early on I had thought to be a painter, but found the whole thing just too messy. Writing is physically less bothersome." The poems in his new collection also seem to amplify the use of personification and anthropomorphism . This leads to a kind of self-objectification, whereby human beings are conflated with the very objects of reality (i.e., anything not human). This amounts to a loss of selfhood and a decentering of the human subject. In the poem, "The Dark Waters," he writes: Behold the clam, the hard lipped mouth in perpetual smile, as if embarrassed at the irony of its choice.... And here jellyfish rise and fall in the tides like brains that have lost their minds. And nowhere does the naked Venus rise.... In addition, some of the poems in this new book, like much of the work in his 200 1 collection, The Tormented Mirror (University of Pittsburgh), use well-known maxims, idioms, or urban myths as a kind of catalyst for exposing disturbing aspects of our collective unconscious as represented in age old phrases. In "Bath Water and Spilled Milk," the poet exposes the unsettling implications in the old saying "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" and humorously intertwines it with the saying, "there's no use crying over spilled milk." When asked about his method, Edson responds: "Poetry is always looking for a language because it is not natural to language as fiction is. . .. But we tend to be embarrassed and fearful of the unconscious; viewing it only at night in the privacy of our dreams. This is why poets have felt the need for the physical distraction of verse to dream awake." This notion of dreaming awake is a writing process that is unique to Edson. It seems to involve a kind of clash between Charles Olson's "proprioception" and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Olson contends that poetry involves a deep inward examination and self-perception that allows energy to be transferred from the poet to the page and, finally, to the reader. Freud's psychoanalysis is a similarkind ofinward looking, but one that involves accessing the unconscious through dreams and intense questioning. Edson seems to take a little of each of these ideas and warps them into an inner reflection turned into an outward "freakshow " that mixes dream, unconscious, subconscious, memory, misperceptions, perceptions, and reality. In an interview in 1999 with poet Peter Johnson, Edson described his poetry as "being fully conscious while tapping into the subconscious or dream mind. . .. My desire has always been to argue the case for reality." For this to happen, according to Edson, there must be a kind of"whole-brain thinking" that includes conscious and unconscious thoughts: "the poem and the dream arise from the same place. It's a place of image and gesture. Which makes a poem a miraculous contradiction ." This method pushes readers to expand their own imaginations and challenges the way in which we think we perceive reality. Edson puts everything into doubt—perception, reality, human behavior, knowledge, truth, memory, and experience—by placing characters in unbelievable realms and scenarios. What often results, however, is a strange and strong compulsion to want to believe what has happened. It is hard to deny the kind of helplessness and despair that pervades Edson's work, but his absurd logic and comic rhetoric often serve to buoy the reader Detailfrom cover with laughter. Reading Edson is a kind oftrade-offbetween delving deep into the often dark and monstrous recesses of the human psyche, on the one hand, and laughing delightfully at his comic wisdom, on the other. He says the following ofthis kind of"collusion": "Somehow life manages to find difficulties no matter how clear the path may seem. It's hard to think ofany living...