Dan Power Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“every night i lie in bed and lie and wait until my mind logs off … until my hardware powers down … i don’t know where i go at night or where i go during the day … i think this lack of knowledge is evident in my writing …”
Michael Chang Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The surreal and the absurd are absolutely necessary. […] My work reflects my own thoughts and impressions about what makes people tick. Turns out I find comfort in the “not knowing”.”
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.”
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.
Tessa Berring Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“In a sense maybe all poetry is absurd? Or at least, all poetry is artifice…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Jennifer L. Knox
“To zag instead of zig. Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's weird and creepy and feels like a ghost is typing through me.” Some good journeys this week with the poetry of Jennifer L. Knox.
The never-ending quest…
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