Sylee Gore Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Inhale an image, exhale a word. Melt a book to paint a mirror. Buy nothing you can borrow. Refill a song. Place a window somewhere evident. Let muscle overcome memory. Is image a language never needing translation?”
Aaron Kent Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Through surrealism, I write connected to activism, connected to absurdity, and connected to art.”
Yi Won Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A central feature of Yi Won’s work is how she sees the world through images rather than meaning. "This feature makes me want to make my poetic language imagery newer and stranger," Yi Won says…"The irony of the closest thing being the most unfamiliar seems to provide an unfamiliar and familiar image at the same time.”
Jeff Hilson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My poems court the absurd in that they’re incongruous, at times silly, and frequently out of tune (from the Latin absurdus) – think The Residents’ Commercial Album, Heinrich Ignatz Franz von Biber’s scordatura tuning for the Rosary Sonatas, as well as The Shaggs…”
Maria Sledmere Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My poetry is made from dream paste, shimmer artifice of momentary disturbance. I like that surrealism is about connection and rupture, copying, aporia. I always felt my soul was pretty alien.”
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
Anne-Laure Coxam Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Love is surreal, surreal is love” - to divert John Lennon’s line (big words! what’s love, what’s surreal?). These poems (what’s a poem?) emerged from an accident, the accident of opening a territory and the accident of venturing into this new intimate territory where two bodies touching and two subconscious minds clinking against each other is full of dangers and an endless surprise.
Kristin Bock Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A successful surreal poem makes the magic happen inside the reader. Strangeness or dream logic can sneak past our rational sensors and scream through us like lightning.”
william erickson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Surreal-Absurd
“I like to say the same things over and over—but spelled different. Have you noticed?” Sharing the work & surreal-absurd outlook of PNW poet william erickson.
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Improvisation, chance, surprise, wild leaps, dream-logic, these are the overriding principles. Resistance to where the brain wants to default. Which is to wake up and start talking like a college-admissions essay. Yuck, am I right?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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
The never-ending quest…
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