See Jack by Russell Edson (review)

colorado review 168 Misery labors under a sabine enchantment. She shakes her copper locks; they rattle as the ships pass through, one by one. Smaller vessels portage. Potash, scrimshaw, bicarbonate of soda. No willpower need apply. Maybe I’m missing some obscure factual connection between Monk and this poem’s content. But it’s hard to imagine anything crucial to understanding and/or enjoying the poem would come from knowing whatever unlikely trivia. Here, that sort of expectation of the reader would be mean and pointless. Throughout this book the distance between title and text (as well as the distance between one sentence and the next) is where much of the pleasure lies. Rather than directly describe or define the name or term, the poem offers a possible experience of its title, and vice versa. A feeling of possibility opens between the title and first sentence, and that openness can trump the potential frustration of the reader’s making sense of the disparities and disconnections. Or it can set up that frustration. But it is too easy to call the disparate materials (especially the titles) arbitrary. There is skill here, there is rigor, and with such craft comes a reader’s trust. And with that trust the connections can be left looser, and the connectivity in sense-making, to an increasing degree, is up to the reader. Or perhaps she will accept , follow, and listen to the radical shifts between sentences, shifts within sentences, rather than attempt to draw connections . And so continues the self-instruction guided by Waldrep’s strange primer. Whether or not connections are drawn, pleasure is found in the musicality of the language as these poems say what they sound. Waldrep reciprocates our trust (or is it initiates?) and leaves us to think inside the gaps and spaces that give shape—that give rhythm—to melody. See Jack, by Russell Edson University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009 reviewed by Michael McLane In See Jack, the nineteenth collection by poet Russell Edson, readers are given three words on which to gain their footing before Edson begins tugging on the rug of logic he has skillfully 169 Book Notes undone so often in his career. The book’s opening poem, “Accidents ,” begins: A man had accidentally gone to bed. When he noticed it he was terribly embarrassed, and said, Of course I’ll marry you, please don’t cry. And then he accidentally fell asleep. While accidents, often of the dismembering or fatal variety, befall many of Edson’s characters, there are few accidents in his craft. Over a nearly sixty-year career, Edson has become the undisputed master of the prose poem while working away in relative obscurity. Edson is a poet’s poet in his devotion to his form and method, a conviction that won him an avid following among his peers and shamefully little recognition from almost everyone else. He began writing prose poems long before it was fashionable, and he has outlasted nearly all of his contemporaries in his trust of the form and belief in its possessing an ontology all its own. Edson’s poetics is one of inclusiveness and the melting of boundaries, a world caught somewhere between the Jungian collective unconscious and Bakhtinian carnival. Where Jung’s anxieties reside in the world of dreams, however, Edson provides his characters no such respite, and where Bakhtin describes carnival as a place where “all were considered equal . . . people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property , profession, and age,” Edson goes immeasurably further to create a world where the living and the mechanical, the twolegged and the four-legged, are equal and undifferentiated in any conventional sense. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the bodies of his characters, which absorb or are absorbed by seemingly everything in their environment, from cars to other beings, human or otherwise, such as the man in “After the Concert ” who takes his cello to bed despite knowing if his fellow musicians knew what he did at night with a cello old enough to be his great-grandmother, they’d report him to the Humane Society. Here we have a conflation of not two, but three...