Kim Hyesoon Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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.”
Simon Collings Surreal Absurd-Sampler
“As a teenager I loved the surreal humour of Monthy Python’s Flying Circus – a programme my parents hated … Python affected me to such an extent that my partner claims it has been the major influence of my life.”
Cassandra Atherton Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My various visits to Japan and love of manga, anime and the kawaii aesthetic have influenced the neo-surreal aspects of my prose poetry…”
Jane Yeh Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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.”
Carrie Etter Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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.”
Ian Seed Surreal-Absurd Sampler
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.
Mark Waldron Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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.”
Ben Niespodziany Surreal-Absurd Sampler
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…
Caroline Bird Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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.”
David Spittle Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Surrealism is a gateway, or permission, through which we can better understand our own ways of understanding and how often they are stifled or politely domesticated in learnt behaviours – ideologically exiled into the hidden, sublimated or repressed…
Lila Matsumoto Surreal-Absurd Sampler
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…
James Roome Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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 Sampler Jenna Clake
“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…”
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Luke Kennard
“The surreal/absurd has always played a huge part in my work, I guess as a tool or a strategy or a thought experiment. Something I like about it is that it’s so easy to go wrong...”
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 . . .
I Download a Baby
These poems are primarily about isolation and the anxiety associated with feeling different, strange, and alone. Another major thread is that of the absurdity of life, and the futility of trying to project any meaning onto it. At times these anxieties manifest themselves as humour, at other times, as surreal dreams or nightmares.
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.
Parade (and other poems)
These poems are from a manuscript composed entirely of prose poems.
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
The never-ending quest…
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