Gulping's Recital - Softcover

Edson, Russell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0578556030 ISBN 13: 9780578556031

Publisher: Tough Poets Press, 2019

Synopsis

Excerpts from Russell Edson's first novel, Gulping's Recital, appeared in The Moderns: An Anthology of New World Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones at the time) and published by Corinth Books in 1963. That was a year prior to the New Directions publication of Edson's breakthrough collection of prose poems, The Very Thing That Happens. In the "Notes on the Authors" section at the back of The Moderns, it stated "Jonathan Williams' Jargon Press is scheduled to bring out the complete Gulping's Recital." For reasons unknown, the Jargon Press edition never materialized and it wasn't until 1984 that Gulping's Recital was finally published, by the small press Guignol Books in Rhinebeck, NY.

This first-ever reissue of Gulping's Recital is published with permission from the Estate of Russell Edson.

About this title

Review:

"Russell Edson is the great comic poet of America. He give us hilarity of events and of people that has turned conventional truths on their respective heads to be seen in new brilliant forms. He is the master of the inappropriate and it is all done magically."
    — David Ignatow

"... one of those originals who appear out of the lonesomeness of a vast, thronged country to create a peculiar and defined world ... a world seen as through the wrong end of a spyglass, minuscule but singularly clear."
    — Denise Levertov

"What makes reading [Edson] a lasting a worthwhile pleasure is the eccentricity of his vision, his freedom in intermingling objective and subjective realities, his grotesque view of our civilization (or, perhaps, better but, his view of our grotesque civilization), and his wonderful sense of humor."
    — Ira Sadoff, Seneca Review

About the Author:

Russell Edson (December 12, 1928 - April 29, 2014), often referred to as "the godfather of the prose poem in America," was a poet, novelist, and illustrator. He was the son of cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson, best known for his work on two popular, long running comic strips, The Gumps and Dondi. Edson studied art early in life and attended the Art Students League of New York as a teenager. His first collection of poetry and short fiction, Ceremonies in Bachelor Space, was published in 1951 by Black Mountain College. In the early 1960s, he self-published several chapbooks of prose poems under the imprint Thing Press, the best of which were later collected into The Very Thing That Happens: Fables and Drawings, published by New Directions in 1964. Numerous other collections followed, as well as a book of plays, The Falling Sickness, also published by New Directions (1975). Throughout his career, his work appeared in countless anthologies and literary magazines. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974), The Whiting Award (1989), and three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships (1976, 1981, 1992).

Mark Tursi is the author of four books of poetry including the forthcoming collection, The Uncanny Valley. He is one of the founders and editors of Apostrophe Books and is currently at work on an anthology of Postmodern American Surrealist poets. He teaches literature and writing at Marymount Manhattan College and New Jersey City University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tough Poets Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0578556030
• ISBN 13: 9780578556031
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 140