Mark Waldron Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“It’s not surrealism but realism that’s the absurdity. It’s a simplistic fantasy of order; a rigid framework pressed onto a surreal universe, so that we might navigate it, and safely get to Tesco and back.”
Ben Niespodziany Surreal-Absurd Sampler
I'm often either bored or overwhelmed with reality. Too much stressful hustle and bustle, or too much mundane routine. To disrupt this norm, whenever I seek media, I always look for the strange…
Caroline Bird Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Sometimes I think trying to write a poem, especially about something that is currently happening, is like standing on burning hot sand. You have to dance from foot to foot, or else you literally cannot stay in that place.”
David Spittle Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Surrealism is a gateway, or permission, through which we can better understand our own ways of understanding and how often they are stifled or politely domesticated in learnt behaviours – ideologically exiled into the hidden, sublimated or repressed…
Lila Matsumoto Surreal-Absurd Sampler
I love writing that may be called absurd or surreal, but which presents the world within their text as absolutely logical. This logic might be manifested through po-faced intonation, curlicued yet grammatically correct syntax, lush landscapes described in a pointillist fashion…
James Roome Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I see the surreality and absurdity of my writing as both a disruption and a form of entertainment. The world can sometimes seem overwhelmingly serious; absurdity undermines this.”
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Jenna Clake
“When I first started reading surreal and Absurd poetry, I was amazed by that the poems – and the poets – could do. I think this is what I’m always trying to do in my poems – see what I can do, and what the poem can do, what I can get away with. I want to always explode what poetry ‘should’ do…”
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Luke Kennard
“The surreal/absurd has always played a huge part in my work, I guess as a tool or a strategy or a thought experiment. Something I like about it is that it’s so easy to go wrong...”
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Jeff Alessandrelli
“I attempted to investigate what doesn’t fit and why that unfitting is often more important than that that fits. The songs on the record that I like best are the ones that momentarily skip before righting themselves. But you remember the skip later. “
Surreal-Absurd Sampler David Greenslade
During lockdown I explored the idea of immobility -- especially the sessile animal known as the sponge. I began to think of myself as a sessile being . . .
I Download a Baby
These poems are primarily about isolation and the anxiety associated with feeling different, strange, and alone. Another major thread is that of the absurdity of life, and the futility of trying to project any meaning onto it. At times these anxieties manifest themselves as humour, at other times, as surreal dreams or nightmares.
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Mark Russell
The poems here are from a new project titled It’s Going To Be a Long Night, Melissa. They mine the ways in which we deceive and are deceived; how our pursuit of meaning and intimacy so persistently misfires; how unremitting is the absurdity, and yet how heartily we laugh into it.
Parade (and other poems)
These poems are from a manuscript composed entirely of prose poems.
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 Charles J. March III
Charles J March III gives us a new exegesis of the holy scriptures.
Surreal-Absurd-Sampler Brian Clifton
“There was a game I used to play as a child. My friends and I would turn off the lights of a room and stare at each other's faces. Because we could only see vague outlines, our imaginations would fill in the details, would distort the faces we knew until they were strange and stranger. I think these experiences are related to seeing the surreal blossom in the contemplated mundane.”
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Glen Armstrong
“I’ve been writing requiems for people I admire lately, some of them fictional, some of them still alive. These folks may have ended up on gum wrappers or Mr. Cobain’s t-shirt or Mr. Zapruder’s movie. They usually share a unique talent that still can’t compensate for a unique and profound sadness. These are a few of those requiems.”
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Hugh Behm-Steinberg
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Matthew Haigh
“The two sets of poems here are the results of experiments with the cut-up technique. Both sets centre around cult television shows with a warm, gay-icon slant (The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote respectively). “
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Lorelei Bacht
“I grew up on French surrealism (my mother would read us Paul Eluard's poetry at bedtime) and I visit this open-ended poetic space whenever I am struggling to make sense of things and/or to write anything sensical.“
The never-ending quest…
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