Tick Tock: Short Stories and Woodcut

by Russell Edson

32 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1992

About the author

Russell Edson (December 12, 1928 – April 29, 2014) was an American poet, novelist, writer, and illustrator. He was the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson.

He studied art early in life and attended the Art Students League as a teenager. He began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His honors as a poet include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, and several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935 and lived there with his wife Frances. Edson, who jokingly has called himself "Little Mr. Prose Poem," is inarguably the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable. In a forthcoming study of the American prose poem, Michel Delville suggests that one of Edson's typical "recipes" for his prose poems involves a modern everyman who suddenly tumbles into an alternative reality in which he loses control over himself, sometimes to the point of being irremediably absorbed--both figuratively and literally--by his immediate and, most often, domestic everyday environment. . . . Constantly fusing and confusing the banal and the bizarre, Edson delights in having a seemingly innocuous situation undergo the most unlikely and uncanny metamorphoses. . . .

Reclusive by nature, Edson has still managed to publish eleven books of prose poems and one novel, The Song of Percival Peacock (available from Coffee House Press).

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Russell Edson woodcut

Here are several Russell Edson pieces most memorable. Enjoy!

THE LONELY EVENINGS OF DOCTOR FUNNYPERSON
Doctor Funnyperson likes bathroom furniture. For chairs he had toilets. His house looks like a public bathroom.
Lately the lonely Doctor Funnyperson is spending the evenings flushing his toilets; even as he studies the problem, why it is he would like to hurt someone.
Meanwhile, he occupies the lonely evenings flushing his toilets one by one . . .

THE PARENTAL DECISION
A man splits into two who are an old woman and an old man.
They must be his parents. But where is the man? Perhaps he gave his life for them . . .
I ask the old couple if they've seen their son.
The old woman says, we've decided not to have any children.

THE SCREAM
In a window is a head full of stairways where people are walking up and down carrying trays of potted plants.
And in that head are stairways where people move up and down carrying bowls of steaming porridge; stairways where people move up and down carrying bowls of mock turtle soup . . .
And then all at once all the people carrying pails of mutton fat up and down the stairways stop and begin to scream . . .
And all at once the head in the window opens its mouth and all the people on the stairways scream . . .

THE TAXI
One night in the dark I phone for a taxi. Immediately, a taxi crashes through the wall; never mind that my room is on the third floor, or that the yellow driver is really a cluster of canaries arranged in the shape of a driver, who flutters apart, streaming from the windows of the taxi in yellow fountains . . .
Realizing that I am in the midst of something splendid I reach for the phone and cancel the taxi: All the canaries flow back into the taxi and assemble themselves into a cluster shaped like a man. The taxi backs through the wall, and the wall repairs . . .
But I cannot stop what is happening. I am already reaching for the phone to call a taxi, which is already beginning to crash through the wall with its yellow driver already beginning to flutter apart . . .

SUMMER, FORTY YEARS LATER
He struggles out of a closet where his mother had hung him forty years ago.
She didn't understand children; she probably thought he was something made of cloth.
He thinks he has waited long enough for her to understand children, even though he is no longer a child.
After forty years a man has a right to seek the hallway; after all, he might even hope for the front door - and who knows, perhaps even a Nobel Prize for patience!

From the front porch he sees that the midday sky is darker than he remembered it; the green of the lawn and trees has also darkened too many nights, too many coats of varnish . . .
This is not the same summer, the color is gone . . .

. . . That little boy who is always passing the house with his wagon has turned into a little old man collecting garbage . . .

THE PREGNANT ONES
A doctor is called to a house where a woman is about to have a baby. But when the doctor gets there he feels a little pregnant himself, and asks the woman's husband to call another doctor.
The woman's husband also looks a little bloated.
The doctor says, hey, you're not pregnant too, are you?
Well, Doctor, it's true, I have been feeling a little pregnant of late. Maybe I caught it from my wife?
When the second doctor arrives it's discovered that he's also pregnant . . .

And so the woman who is about to have a baby listens far into the night as three men argue about names for their own unborn children, which they fully expect will be sons . . .