3rd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 28 :: BARRETT WARNER on RUSSELL EDSON’s ‘SHEET MUSIC’
By: The Operating System
Tags: Community, Poetry, Inspiration, Writing

In spite of the glories of spoken word poets who harken back to poetry’s oral tradition — yet maybe a tradition on steroids — contemporary poetry has been slowly evolving from a spoken to a visual song. It wasn’t natural selection and there weren’t any asteroids involved, just a steady-gets-it kind of progress from Sappho to Timothy Liu.

Along comes Russell Edson to spare us the existential question, how did we get here? Edson is how we got here. First a little background on the sonic versus ocular debate.

When poems were chiseled on stone, mistakes were hard to fix. A poet, like a musician, might rehearse for days and days. Poems weren’t written as they were composed; they were composed, and then written down. The invention of moveable type in 1500 meant that letters did not have to be drawn or hammered anymore, and the form of a stanza began to diverge from its original oral function pertaining to Greek figures of speech and rhythm.

Hello internet! The great thing about online publications is that we can finally go back to drawing poems. Many poets and poet illustrators from Tony Barnstone to John Dermot Woods are putting the poetry graphic novel alongside other recently rediscovered subgenres such as flash fiction and the prose poem.

The old blind naked Tiresias in me who is taking a tub while Blake Butler anxiously brushes his teeth wonders if all this line shaping is the result of no one having a flair for prosody. Not sure how voice and breath break a line? Try writing all the way across the page. It even pays better. Find yourself in agony over the right word? Try sketching it with a few thought balloons for effect. If a picture is a thousand words, then it should also be at least a dozen sonnets and maybe a hundred haiku.

The result is a literature of “sustained wackiness” which imitates the absurd. Matt Cook’s delightful Proving Nothing to Anyone is a great example. Cook writes poems of perception and misperception — the heart of pictographic writing — and some have not quite rightly compared him with Jack Handy. Cook’s poems operate from only a fraction of experience. Compare this to Hemingway, who believed you had to die in order to write about death.

Since so many new poets have made their successes via the internet, and so many older poets have come out with 2.0 versions of themselves — I’m thinking here of the wonderful Bill Knott who flipped his handmade chapbooks on LuLu.com — it is tempting to attribute the move away from an oral drama towards a visual / virtual drama as having something to do with technology. But the real shift began in 1951, the year Russell Edson published his first book at the age of sixteen. Eighteen other poetry volumes have followed, as well as plays and a novel, and books of illustrated fables.

Edson now seems like a prophet and not just because he’s almost eighty. Learning of Edson and his father, who was both a cartoonist and a screenwriter, it isn’t so hard to predict the fascinating post-millennial arrival of video poet like Stephanie Barber who also combines all three forms…drama, visual symbol, language. The interesting point is that while poetry began with talkies and has evolved into silent pictures, film began with silent nickelodeon sketches and then evolved into talkies.

In the case of Edson, the apple didn’t fall far from the juicer. Edson himself is an accomplished artist and executes all of his cover art. As a poet, his chief focus is “the dark uncomfortable metaphor.” Anyone smirking along in the Alt-Lit scene should take notice: Russell Edson is your literary Godfather.

Edson writes stanzas as if they were panels in series. The space between the panels — the gutter — well there is poetry in there too.