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.”
Tessa Berring Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“In a sense maybe all poetry is absurd? Or at least, all poetry is artifice…”
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.”
Prescribee
Some poems from Chia-Lun Chang’s prize winning Prescribee
Ronan Fenton Surreal-Absurd Samper
“The Surreal has always been my refuge from a world in which I could once only recognize a system governed by pre-established rules, before I inevitably came to embrace the disorder, whirling in deluge, that lay alongside and underneath it.”
The Elegy Season
Everything talks in requiems. The mountains cry out in forested waves, leaves speak from vanished syllables, the sun shatters the world through magnetic spots…
Midsummer and Other visual poems
These five visual poems reflect on belonging and not belonging, on the unreliability of memory and perspective, and even language
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
‘Where there is waiting, a language opens’: Susie Campbell’s The Sleeping Place, Reviewed by Stephen Sunderland
Stephen Sunderland Reviewed The Sleeping Place by Susie Campbell (Guillemot Press, 2023)
Nicola Winborn Reviews Toys for Telepaths by Stephen Nelson (Red Fox Press, 2023)
Nicola Winborn reviews Toys for Telepaths by Stephen Nelson (Red Fox Press, 2023).
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…”
The Poetics of Sex in ‘The Bare Thing’ by Len Lukowski (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), Reviewed and Interviewed by JP Seabright
Len Lukowski, reviewed and interviewed by JP Seabright
Genesis
I believe prose poetry is a portal to opening people up to the idea of poetry. When it is surreal or absurd prose poetry, the reader is suddenly, God forbid, having fun with a form of poetry. vAs much as this applies to poetry and Mercurius, I think the same is true of the Bible, as we try to make meaningful and relevant ways to make it accessible to modern living.
Her Baroness Stripped Bare By The Bachelor, Even
The early Twentieth Century saw a glorious liberating explosion in the world of Art. And a lot of artists became very famous and very rich. But not all of them: my poem is a biographical sketch of a woman who was there at the start of this creative burst, responsible for a great deal of it, and yet whose name has mostly been forgotten.
Liberate the Future
‘Liberate the Future’ consists of flights of fantasy which may seem surreal or even satirical, but might better be thought as ingenious, unrestrained and concrete ways of thinking about alternative futures, and in the sections below, Katzeff offers readers a series of modest proposals for rewilding the moon, transplanting Hong Kong, taking mushrooms directly, and solving the coming housing crisis through more ambitious forms of clothing.
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.”
dancing in the womb and its poetic of becoming: Susie Campbell on Rezia Wahid
Susie Campbell reviews Dancing in the Womb by Rezia Wahid (Hesterglock Press, 2022)
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.
Remains
These visual poems are made of remains. Remains is all what was left of what we don't use. Especially what remains of words and colors. Words that we no longer use, that turn into fragments and stammering. Words related to the rest of colors left unused in the tubes.
The never-ending quest…
Sign up to receive our free fortnightly newsletter-publication and occasionally a free book