Let Us Consider
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....
Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....
Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora....
Russell Edson, "Let Us Consider" from The Rooster's Wife. Copyright © 2005 by Russell Edson. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.
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Poet Russell Edson b. 1935
POET’S REGION U.S., New England
Subjects Relationships, Home Life, Family & Ancestors, Arts & Sciences, Philosophy, Mythology & Folklore, Ghosts & the Supernatural
Poetic Terms Prose Poem
Biography
Called the “godfather of the prose poem in America,” Russell Edson’s idiosyncratic body of work is populated with strange and intriguing figures: a woman fights a tree, a mother serves ape; in the poem “Let Us Consider,” there’s a “farmer who makes his straw hat his sweetheart” and an “old woman who makes a floor lamp her son.” The poems are surreal and fablelike, sometimes resembling brief plays. Donald Hall has said of Edson’s . . .
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Relationships, Home Life, Family & Ancestors, Arts & Sciences, Philosophy, Mythology & Folklore, Ghosts & the Supernatural
POET’S REGION U.S., New England
Poetic Terms Prose Poem
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Let Us Consider
