Surreal-Absurd

“A significant period mainly writing found prose poems brought me closest to a sustained absurdist style – the random connections of found content – but being arbitrary and staccato, they lacked the more usual storytelling…”

Surreal-Absurd

“I spend a lot of time trying to work things out only to find that I can’t work things out - there’s weird stuff everywhere so we may as well simplify it to bring about some clarity. The world is brutal and careless. What fascinates me is the challenge of normalising fantastical ideas and Frances and Martine gave me a dialogue to explore that.”

Surreal-Absurd

“I’m not sure why I persist in associating absurdity with happiness when the concept is rooted in death and when a human induced sixth mass extinction has recently upped the absurdity stakes significantly. But here we are. ‘Now for lunch’ as Ron Padgett writes at the end of his poem ‘The Death Deal’.”

Surreal-Absurd

“Is it an icy cold, airy, high-blue glacier atmosphere? Or an underwater world of deepblue breathing sounds? I don’t understand how it works, I maybe have a highly-functioning tendency for hallucination, but when I write it’s like I sleepwalk and suddenly find myself in that place.”—Aase Berg”

Surreal-Absurd

There’s a freedom and a weightlessness that comes with working alongside another version of yourself, as if you can forget all those concerns around ‘personal voice’ that are content-related, and just focus on the music of it.

Surreal-Absurd

“Imagination is the process of moving muscle in sync with bone, to a place of freedom, poetry’s vast outer side. It activates something to nothing. Perhaps I should say it’s a cloud mill? The place where cloud(poetry) knows but poet(me) doesn’t know.”

Surreal-Absurd

“I’m probably drawn to the surreal because I’m easily bored. When I’m in the process of writing a poem, I’m mainly trying to keep myself interested in each line and what might come next, so taking leaps of imagination or language are what I’ve found will most engage my attention.”

Surreal-Absurd

“At times it seems the surreal can convey the truth of an experience or emotion most accurately--that only by changing or bending the rules of what's possible can we appreciate how something in the world works.”

Surreal-Absurd

The absurd-surreal is a form of realism, and, in my case, a confession by other means. My poem-stories seek to unsettle, to entertain, and to move. They revisit memory through dream, imagination and, on occasion, collage. They are as full of yearning as they are of irony. I want you to believe in them.

Surreal-Absurd

“It’s not surrealism but realism that’s the absurdity. It’s a simplistic fantasy of order; a rigid framework pressed onto a surreal universe, so that we might navigate it, and safely get to Tesco and back.”

Surreal-Absurd

I'm often either bored or overwhelmed with reality. Too much stressful hustle and bustle, or too much mundane routine. To disrupt this norm, whenever I seek media, I always look for the strange…

“Sometimes I think trying to write a poem, especially about something that is currently happening, is like standing on burning hot sand. You have to dance from foot to foot, or else you literally cannot stay in that place.”

Surreal-Absurd

I love writing that may be called absurd or surreal, but which presents the world within their text as absolutely logical. This logic might be manifested through po-faced intonation, curlicued yet grammatically correct syntax, lush landscapes described in a pointillist fashion…

Surreal-Absurd

“I see the surreality and absurdity of my writing as both a disruption and a form of entertainment. The world can sometimes seem overwhelmingly serious; absurdity undermines this.”

Surreal-Absurd

“When I first started reading surreal and Absurd poetry, I was amazed by that the poems – and the poets – could do. I think this is what I’m always trying to do in my poems – see what I can do, and what the poem can do, what I can get away with. I want to always explode what poetry ‘should’ do…”