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
SJ Fowler Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I first met Babs when I first met Babs in London. … I went into a shop on the Bethnal Green Road, surrounded by people pretending to be poets, and met her basically. I thought I had seen it all, but here was this purple cat…”
Sawako Nakayasu Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“At some point, as if there was some kind of tipping point, there seemed to be enough surreal aspects to the supposedly real world, which made it simply a more honest way to try to reckon with said world. In terms of poetic practices, it was Francis Ponge and his delightful prose poems that held open the door for me.”
Evan Williams Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Where bodybuilding ended for me, writing began. I adopted what I think of as a Poetics of Silliness, which relies heavily on the Surreal. The Surreal for me is so deeply entangled with the Queer, not just because both are related to open expressions of joy, but because they each represent opportunities of relief.
Satoshi Iwai Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Satoshi Iwai was born and lives in Kanagawa, Japan. He writes poems in English and in Japanese. His English work has appeared in Fairly Tale Review, Newfound, Into the Void, Phantom Drift, Outlook Springs, and elsewhere.
Shivani Mehta Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Shivani Mehta’s prose poems will be sure to stop you in your tracks. Magical and surreal, her block-form poetics weave fairytales with fables, origin myths with domesticity.
Stephen Sunderland Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“When I found Surrealism, I was attracted by its extremism – but whilst automatism is invigorating it’s also exhausting. I’m glad to have found other surrealist methods enabling me to ‘manifest’ my writing using chance…”
The Paw is Golden & Delicious
Beginning to see my life is a Monkey’s Paw. Body perfectly formed, a miniature among giants, vinyl gloves pointing to mutancy…
Evan Nicholls Surreal-Absurd Sampler
My work engages the surreal for two reasons: fun and ease. In writing, I haven’t found anything that comes as natural as the absurd and unnatural. Or as entertaining.
Liam Bates Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My interest in the surreal and absurd predates my interest in poetry. We almost all have dreams, I guess, but not everybody wants to hear about them. I have always wanted to hear about them, to have a poke around in someone's selfhood, beyond those pesky impositions like veracity and linear time.”
Sascha A. Akhtar Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The surreal and the absurd are the twin axes along which the expanse of my work may well be plotted. I would say my introduction to Salvador Dali at a young age had a profound effect on my ideas of the imagination and what forms it could and indeed must produce…”
Thomas Helm Surreal-Absurd Sampler
For me, writing surreal-absurd poetry is a way of sifting through the unconscious and encountering things that feel important there. Often the best images are those that feel all too real despite their obvious artifice.
Réka Nyitrai Surreal-Absurd Sampler
The surreal has always played a pivotal role in my writing, essentially as a tool / strategy for dealing with suppressed emotions; uninviting reality, and unfulfilled dreams and desires. My poems afford an opportunity to disrupt the everyday with the unusual.
Gabriel Gudding Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“If art partly functions by pulling us out of our common habits of perception, maybe it necessarily offers a foretaste of the way the real will transgress against itself in crime, catastrophe, and accident: poetry's untidiness seems to adumbrate the unvraveling of everything…”
Beachcombing
These prose poems express the mess of hope, fear, memory, longing and, above all, uncertainty that’s left behind when the desiccated three-word slogan of our brave new soundbite world has been tossed away.
Mike Ferguson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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…”
Hilda Sheehan Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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.”
Jeremy Over Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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’.”
Aase Berg Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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”
Luke Palmer Surreal-Absurd Sampler
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.
The never-ending quest…
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