The Wondrous Edgar Oliver, Featured in Vanity Fair

We are so in love with this Vanity Fair Daily profile of New York's Edgar Oliver, the 50-something writer and performer who wears the "downtown darling" moniker like no other. David Foxley serves him well:

[T]he actor-poet-playwright still draws a crowd with an inimitable instrument: vocal cords that do otherworldly things with a syllable, as he inserts them in unheard-of places, spreading letters so long and thin they quiver through his lips like dead leaves over pavement. On “In Prospect Park,” a track featured on his album of poetry The Hermit & Other Poems, a cult favorite on iTunes in the three years since its release, the word “park” sounds something like “payerrrikah” and, after Oliver has his way, “afraid” closer to “ughfrrriiid.”

Oliver has a new book of poems out, The Brooklyn Public Library, "published by Oilcan Press as a limited-edition series of 200 copies, features on its pumpkin-colored cover a twisting black form resembling a dead oak tree that was painted by Oliver’s sister Helen. Inside, several other artistic renderings and photographs of trees appear alongside the writings." More more:

“[Oliver] said, ‘There should be trees in this book,’ so that’s what happened,” says Aaron Howard, Oliver’s editor and publisher at Oilcan Press. “We picked up trees by a variety of other artist friends, a few fine photos, and suddenly we have the best book we’ve made so far. It’s great to have the opportunity to edit these books with Edgar and present this material to the world in our handmade way.”

“I’d say that all of my writings are autobiographical but not always about childhood, although I do like to write about childhood,” says Oliver, who looks a bit like Steve Buscemi playing the role of John Waters. Of youth, he adds with a laugh, “There’s a sense of magic in being alive.”

Aside from Oliver’s idyllic associations to his salad days, a thread of darker connotations is just as apparent throughout his oeuvre. When he performs or reads aloud, his hollowed visage hardly conceals the tormented boy of his poems and public persona. His recent poem “By the Lagoon” underscores this fixation: “that I was that boy I once was,/ still living there among the trees./ When night fell, though, terror overcame me.” Having spent his adult youth in the East Village, long before the Mud Truck or Parker Posey moved to the gentrified neighborhood, Oliver playfully recalls those years in a way that smacks of someone who aged, at least psychologically, in reverse. A New York Times review of Oliver’s 2009 one-man show, East 10th Street: Self Portrait with Empty House, describes the poet’s self-analysis as having “a whisper of cheer that finds warmth in the lonely darkness.” And it’s true; Oliver is, among many other things, a master of the Mona Lisa smile.

Read it all here. And to hear that incredible voice, watch Edgar read from The Brooklyn Public Library at this year's Poetry Project New Year's Day Marathon Reading, below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96EV-WromXc