FIELD Symposium Russell Edson

According to the editors of FIELD Magazine, the publication’s “association with Russell Edson goes all the way back to FIELD #7 (Fall 1972), which featured five of his prose poems, among them ‘An Old Man’s Son’:

There was an old man who had a kite for a son, which he would let up into the air attached to a string, when he had need to be alone.

…And would watch this high bloom of himself, as something distant that will be close again…

“Those weren’t the only prose poems in that issue; we also had one by W. S. Merwin, two by Jean Valentine, and four by Erica Pedretti . . . But everyone knew that if you wanted to talk about the prose poem in contemporary poetry, you began and ended with the strange, commanding genius of Edson.”

Featured in FIELD #93 (Fall 2015), Russell Edson: A FIELD Symposium includes John Gallaher (“So Are We to Laugh or What”), Dennis Schmitz (“Edson’s Animals”), Lee Upton (“Counting Russell Edson”), Charles Simic (“Easy as Pie”), B. K. Fischer (“Some Strange Conjunction”), and Jon Loomis (“Consider the Ostrich”).