Lecture for an Empty Room

, fragments of a work-in-progress;

I’m fascinated by the potentially infinite array of how literary influence shapes writing. How could American short story writer Lydia Davis, one of the most striking prose stylists of the past few decades (as well as one of my personal favourite writers), profess that the late Connecticut prose poet Russell Edson (1935-2014) was the most important writer on the development of her style? Whatever overlap between their work might exist, one of these things is not like the other.

One of the first of my contemporaries I encountered with a personal library as large as mine was the late Toronto writer Priscila Uppal (1974-2018), and there was something both striking and wonderfully exciting upon realizing our libraries had little to no overlap. From what I could see, only P.K. Page’s Hologram (1994) was the exception, although I’m sure there were others. Based on her library alone, one might gather that Uppal’s was a literature fueled by a narrative lyric with a more European base, offering a heft of titles by Guernica Editions and Exile Editions, which sat as a counterpoint to my own, rooted in 1960s Canadian postmodernism: west coast TISH poetics, Talonbooks and Coach House Press, into the prairies and south, towards Black Mountain, Richard Brautigan and the San Francisco Renaissance. I remember thinking how glorious it was to see a collection so wildly different but equal in scale, and the two in counterpoint suggested to me the mark of a healthy, vibrant literature: knowing these alternate perspectives were both held in high regard. If you want a quick overview of how any writer is shaped, head straight for their library.

Of course, influence is rarely a straight line. A collage, perhaps, or a constellation. I remember a conversation with Kingston writer Steven Heighton (1961-2022) and Ottawa poet David O’Meara, back when O’Meara had that apartment in Ottawa’s Lowertown; how they both swore by John Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” as collected through his 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). I remain baffled by their attachment to the work. I’ve also never understood how anyone could enjoy the poetry of Don Coles, another poet I know admired by Heighton and O’Meara. What am I missing? The years I’ve attempted to return to the work of Robert Duncan, unable to grasp the appeal, despite admiring the work of multiple writers who swear by him; despite my holding Duncan’s contemporary and compatriot Jack Spicer as such an important poet across my own trajectory, as well as Robin Blaser, the third in their triumvirate of American poetry and poetics. The San Francisco Renaissance: Spicer, Duncan and Blaser. What am I missing?

In some ways, I find Davis citing Edson reminiscent of longtime and former Talonbooks publisher Karl Siegler who once offered that he could see how the works of Vancouver poet George Bowering or Montreal poet Artie Gold influenced my work, but couldn’t understand my attachment to the work of the late prairie poet Andrew Suknaski. I mean, I thought it might have been obvious, but I suppose not: I came to Suknaski through the work of Dennis Cooley (and other prairie writers, I’m sure), latching onto Suknaski’s self-described “loping, coyote lines,” and quickly realized an affinity to how he returned to writing on the histories and complications of his geography-of-origin, a geographic and cultural space that had not yet been articulated through poetry. This is where I might point to the crowd, and bellow: I say “Glengarry,” you say “Wood Mountain.” A chant begins.

Years ago I read an essay by American poet Sarah Manguso on Edson’s poems; despite usually believing and following whatever Manguso might say about anything, I was never convinced by the work of Russell Edson, said to be the father of the American prose poem. I picked up a copy of a selected poems, The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson (1994), hoping something might spark, but no dice. I couldn’t hear music in his poems, feeling them closer to incomplete short stories than to the electric possibilities of the prose poem, especially against poets such as Rosmarie Waldrop, Lisa Jarnot, Lisa Robertson, Robert Kroetsch, Anne Carson and others. How was Edson’s work so praised?

And so, when a copy of Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Rssell Edson (2023) landed in my mailbox, I wondered if this might provide some sense of what it is I’d been missing, or at least, not getting? Perhaps it is as simple as requiring the correct entry point. In my late twenties, after hearing from a variety of writers around me on the brilliance of the work of Toronto poet David McFadden, the half-dozen titles I encountered weren’t providing me with any answers as to why, until I picked up a copy of his Governor General’s Award-shortlisted The Art of Darkness (1984). This book immediately became my personal Rosetta Stone for the since-late McFadden’s fifty years of publishing. With that one title, all of his lyric narratives, observations, first-person oddities and all-around brilliance became abundantly and absolutely clear.

There are ways that Edson’s odd narratives, populated with fragments and layerings of scenes and characters, feel akin to musings, constructed as narrative accumulations across the structure of the prose poem. And yet, there are times I wonder how these are “prose poems” instead of being called, perhaps, “postcard fictions” or “flash fictions.” It would appear that an important element of Edson’s form is the way the narratives turn between sentences: his sentences accumulate, but don’t necessarily form a straight line. There are elements of the surreal, but Edson is no surrealist; instead, he seems a realist who blurs and layers his statements up against the impossible. I might not be able to hear a particular music through Edson’s lines, but there certainly is a patterning; a layering, of image and idea, of narrative overlay, offering moments of introspection as the poems throughout the collection become larger, more complex. As well, Edson’s poems seem to favour the ellipses, offering multiple openings but offering no straightforward conclusions, easy or otherwise. Not a surrealist, but a poet who offers occasional deflections of narrative. Even a deflection is an acknowledgment of the real, as a shape drawn around an absence. A deflection, or an array of characters who might not necessarily be properly paying attention, or speaking the truth of the story.

As part of his afterword in Little Mr. Prose Poem, editor Craig Morgan Teicher wrote that Edson is “obsessed with miscommunication; it is his bedrock truth. People don’t listen to each other, are generally intent on fulfilling their own needs, and willfully ignorant of the needs of those around them. His characters constantly argue and contradict one another.” If nothing else, this collection does provide a bit of perspective; I can now see Edson’s influence in a variety of younger American poets, most overtly through Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany (who I do think is doing some great things), but also through Evan Williams, Shane Kowalski, Zachary Schomburg, Leigh Chadwick and the late Noah Eli Gordon, as well as through Manguso herself, across those early poetry collections. In many ways, Niespodziany might even be the closest to an inheritor I’ve seen of Edson’s writing, although with the added element of a more overt surrealism via Canadian poet Stuart Ross. And perhaps, through Little Mr. Prose Poem, I am slowly beginning to understand what all the fuss has been about.