Stuart Ross Surreal-Absurd Sampler
In 1984 I founded a school of writing I called Demento Primitivo. It really caught on, at least among me. The people and other creatures and objects in my poems and stories often push themselves beyond the boundaries of realism and into the dementations of reality. Reality is the bubbling cauldron of absurdity we are flung into. The giant ladle of surrealism stirs us around and around until we capitulate to its nurturing demands.
Laura Wetherington Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Thylias Moss once said to me that the knots and turns in a tree’s branches are all evidence of failures, but in the context of a complex system, they make the tree beautiful and unique. I turned to the trees, first with tree rubbings, and then with collage. I am making new sonnets, visual ones then, in the spirit of Antonin Artaud’s desire to get outside of language.”
Chris Gutkind Surreal-Absurd
I feel my work is utterly real, in itself and what it refers to in myself or in the world outside myself, but to make it real I may use the unreal or strange or impossible, an old working truth of poetry and all art, that's always been one of its main practices, and a very effective one when done well, making us see and feel the world anew and more deeply than before, adding to the thickness and complexity of the real, and as many have said: art lies to tell the truth
Sin Yong-Mok Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Surreal-Absurd
Ghosts appear in many plays. A long time ago the actor who played the Ghost had to get rid of his body. Only his voice was left. It must have been before someone wearing a white sheet took on the role of the Ghost. The person playing the Ghost had to be a ghost, just as he who plays Macbeth must be Macbeth. The actor killed himself to play the Ghost. He did not realize that once his body was gone, he would lose his voice. He shouted, but no lines were left on stage. He moved, but no action remained on stage. But the audience was listening to his voice. By thinking of the actor who had become a ghost, they themselves became haunted houses.
- Sin Yong-Mok (translated by Brother Anthony)
Julian Stannard Surreal-Absurd Sampler
I started writing in earnest when I moved to Genoa in 1984. I lived in the Centro Storico, the city within the city, the largest extant medieval settlement in Europe – a labyrinth. I didn’t realise how much the strangeness of the place would get under my skin. Dickens writes about Genoa in Pictures from Italy and his account holds true today - a phantasmagoric interaction between grandeur and squalor.
Natalie Shaw Surreal-Absurd Sampler
I am a tiny despot and my poems are my queendoms, full of palaces and trees just as I choose. They are magical boxes, or very intricate paper pop-ups, or entire carved worlds waiting to be tipped out of a hollowed-out bean. Each one has its own logic and necessariness.
Lee Sumyeong Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Andre Breton wrote in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto that “Swift is Surrealist in malice, / Sade is Surrealist in sadism. / Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism.” Lee Sumyeong might be described as being surrealist in the quotidian. The oneiric dimensions of Lee’s poems are characterized less by heterocosmic displacement or absolute logical disseverment that by an intense defamiliarization of the mundane—one sometimes so extreme as to be anti-anthropic in its effects. - Colin Leemarshall
Ailbhe Darcy Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Night-gardens erupt across the kitchen window; my body, where you touch it, blossoms tiny white flowers, a purple bruise at the centre of each one. The flare of a red dress at a French lesson. A white spider holds up a white moth, engagingly. The sun speaks. A woman opens her front door to Jesus Christ and ushers him inside. To write poetry at all might be to see what in the world is beautiful because it is absurd.”
Lesle Lewis Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“It doesn’t seem to me true to be one or the other. I think of it as a spectrum and not a binary division of real from surreal or sense from nonsense. I think of it as inclusive, the surreal being part of the real, the real as part of the surreal, the sensical in nonsense and the nonsense in sense, a new sense.”
Joyelle McSweeney Surreal-Absurd Sampler
As long as I can remember, I have wanted to make a WAR ON HEAVEN, and take back the things that were taken from me.
SURREALISM and ABSURDISM well equip us for a WAR ON HEAVEN.
The tools we need for a reversal of fortunes are right in front of us, easily to hand. We must simply take up the weapons that harm us and REVERSE them. Thus the Surrealist/absurdist logics of reversal, especially of scale, but also of such elements as up and down, big and little, strong and weak, cause and effect-- may-- MUST-- be reversed in the artwork, releasing a scouring bolt that renders the work of art an ENGINE AGAINST THE ALMIGHTY.
Joyelle McSweeney
Jake Levine Surreal-Absurd Sampler
The turn toward the surreal or the absurd, is the turn from tragedy into comedy. It’s not a matter of imagination, but a matter of perspective. The opposite side of the absurd, is that it is unbearable if we don’t imagine Sisyphus happy. All my poems are autobiographical. The mirror is unbearable. The surreal is that well I have to look down to capture my reflection. - Jake Levine
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Jeff Alessandrelli
“I attempted to investigate what doesn’t fit and why that unfitting is often more important than that that fits. The songs on the record that I like best are the ones that momentarily skip before righting themselves. But you remember the skip later. “
Surreal-Absurd Sampler David Greenslade
During lockdown I explored the idea of immobility -- especially the sessile animal known as the sponge. I began to think of myself as a sessile being . . .
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Mark Russell
The poems here are from a new project titled It’s Going To Be a Long Night, Melissa. They mine the ways in which we deceive and are deceived; how our pursuit of meaning and intimacy so persistently misfires; how unremitting is the absurdity, and yet how heartily we laugh into it.
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Judson Hamilton
"These poems are from a manuscript I’m working on called The Vogue for Flatness, so we’re still learning about one another. Poems for me are a way to filter the world, to make sense of it, to live in it. Perhaps it’s having been raised in suburbia or a childhood steeped in comics and cable TV, but there seems to me no other honest way to do this than through the surreal, absurd, and grotesque." - Judson Hamilton
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Charles J. March III
Charles J March III gives us a new exegesis of the holy scriptures.
Surreal-Absurd-Sampler Brian Clifton
“There was a game I used to play as a child. My friends and I would turn off the lights of a room and stare at each other's faces. Because we could only see vague outlines, our imaginations would fill in the details, would distort the faces we knew until they were strange and stranger. I think these experiences are related to seeing the surreal blossom in the contemplated mundane.”
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Glen Armstrong
“I’ve been writing requiems for people I admire lately, some of them fictional, some of them still alive. These folks may have ended up on gum wrappers or Mr. Cobain’s t-shirt or Mr. Zapruder’s movie. They usually share a unique talent that still can’t compensate for a unique and profound sadness. These are a few of those requiems.”
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Hugh Behm-Steinberg
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Matthew Haigh
“The two sets of poems here are the results of experiments with the cut-up technique. Both sets centre around cult television shows with a warm, gay-icon slant (The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote respectively). “
The never-ending quest…
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