See Jack

Recently, a friend asked for reading recommendations for surviving facism. We listed poets who have lived and written within and through fascist regimes. It is a long list, one that continues growing. Mine has started to sprawl to include various liminal poetics of resistance. Russell Edson’s surreal, subversive, and unnerving prose poems remind me that much of what is now accepted as the nature of things was imagined by someone. And there are other ways to imagine and so understand what we have created and who we can become.

In See Jack, the difficult and uncomfortable is mantled in humor, the abject made palatable. We laugh when Jack falls from the sky and becomes “a sack of broken bones, blood weeping from his weave” as we do when the cartoon bomb detonates and leaves an animated coyote’s face in a blackened blast pattern, or an actor pratfalls in a sitcom. Or when a man is consumed by what he has consumed in “The Hunger:”

A man puts his head in a hat. But the hat thinks he’s feeding it, and begins to swallow his head.
No, no, Hat, I’m just completing my costume!
But his hat begins to suck his head like a huge mouth nursing a breast, sucking the milk of his thoughts into its crown.

Edson’s work boils with genitals, breasts, taboo sexual practices, rats, and turds. Here the nearly infinite violences of American culture are revealed to be what is truly obscene: maximal  individualism, the narrow and confining roles of the nuclear family and heteronormative relationships; the waste and refuse generated by extreme materialism and compulsive consumerism; the commodification of the non-human; the dehumanization of other humans; the obscene violence of our defining mythologies; even, or especially, our language, as in “Eggs:” 

Beat them before they’ve found their beaks and claws.

Separate yolks from whites. Beat whites into a feathery froth. Beat yolks in a back room with a fly swatter.

Quickly combine yolks with whites before they forget what might have been…