Kasey thinks Russell Edson has gotten a bad rap. Otherwise agrees with me about Simic, early Tate being a better poet, etc... My objection to Edson is the lack of tension in the language: completely flat in tone and register. This is not language charged with meaning. His poetry is basically a series of "theater of the absurd" vignettes, featuring animals of various species, recounted in an almost invariable deadpan tone. And I learn from Kasey's post that Edson sounds "anti-intellectual" in his interviews. I've never seen an interview with him, but this doesn't surprise me a bit. How could he possibly be an intellectual?

The entire weight must be thrown unto the profundity of the anecdotes, since the poetry doesn't offer other "stuff." Once I realized that all the anecdotes are basically identical, as Kasey himself pointed out, I lost all interest in him; it doesn't give me enough. His roots are not in surrealism, I believe, but in Ionescu and the theater of the absurd.

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I felt so conflicted today I went to a restaurant by myself and asked for separate checks.