Chris Gutkind Surreal-Absurd
Perhaps I'm a bit of an imposter here, I don't think of my work as especially surreal or absurd, it's not often directly so in a full poem way, though I've tried to include some of that here, it's more that there are surreal and absurd elements in some of the poems, non-rational or illogical thrusts. Like most poets perhaps, 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. I've picked some poems that illustrate, I hope, how my work often straddles this tension and aspect of us. Generally I pop in and out of the surreal, rarely creating a whole artificial or unreal world, when I want that I usually don't try to create it but prefer to read it. Current surreal and absurd work operates in so many different ways and covers a huge amount of subjects, my work scribbles around the edges, I don't think I have it in me to fully immerse my pen in a more complete and hermetic odd world, maybe some day! - Chris Gutkind
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Chris Gutkind started in The Hague, lived many years in Montreal and then more in London. He's a librarian and writes poems and children's tales, the latter unpublished. Books are Inside to Outside, Options (with artist Trevor Simmons), and What Happened. Some poems from his first collection can be found at poetrypf, more recent poems are at Pamenar and forthcoming in Writers Forum e-zine. More of a current project, Digits After Orph, can be found in Datableed, theHythe, Berfrois, Erotoplasty, Firmament, Shearsman, Otoliths, Ludd Gang. It is a series of 55 poems gridded atop Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus and in book form all will have options for selected words or lines on facing pages. Anthologies: The Stumbling Dance, Disease, Hilson Hilson, Corroding the Now, Kruk Book, Wretched Strangers. A photo-project, Isolation Collaboration, done during the UK covid lockdown can be seen at Permeable Barrier, and a poetry collab from the time, Gravity Bubbles, done with Marcus Silcock and Callie Michail, is printed in the 2021 Prototype annual and previously online at Babel Tower Notice Board.
