Thomas Helm Surreal-Absurd Sampler
For me, writing surreal-absurd poetry is a way of sifting through the unconscious and encountering things that feel important there. Often the best images are those that feel all too real despite their obvious artifice.
Réka Nyitrai Surreal-Absurd Sampler
The surreal has always played a pivotal role in my writing, essentially as a tool / strategy for dealing with suppressed emotions; uninviting reality, and unfulfilled dreams and desires. My poems afford an opportunity to disrupt the everyday with the unusual.
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…”
Beachcombing
These prose poems express the mess of hope, fear, memory, longing and, above all, uncertainty that’s left behind when the desiccated three-word slogan of our brave new soundbite world has been tossed away.
Mike Ferguson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A significant period mainly writing found prose poems brought me closest to a sustained absurdist style – the random connections of found content – but being arbitrary and staccato, they lacked the more usual storytelling…”
Hilda Sheehan Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I spend a lot of time trying to work things out only to find that I can’t work things out - there’s weird stuff everywhere so we may as well simplify it to bring about some clarity. The world is brutal and careless. What fascinates me is the challenge of normalising fantastical ideas and Frances and Martine gave me a dialogue to explore that.”
Jeremy Over Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I’m not sure why I persist in associating absurdity with happiness when the concept is rooted in death and when a human induced sixth mass extinction has recently upped the absurdity stakes significantly. But here we are. ‘Now for lunch’ as Ron Padgett writes at the end of his poem ‘The Death Deal’.”
Aase Berg Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Is it an icy cold, airy, high-blue glacier atmosphere? Or an underwater world of deepblue breathing sounds? I don’t understand how it works, I maybe have a highly-functioning tendency for hallucination, but when I write it’s like I sleepwalk and suddenly find myself in that place.”—Aase Berg”
Luke Palmer Surreal-Absurd Sampler
There’s a freedom and a weightlessness that comes with working alongside another version of yourself, as if you can forget all those concerns around ‘personal voice’ that are content-related, and just focus on the music of it.
Kim Hyesoon Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Imagination is the process of moving muscle in sync with bone, to a place of freedom, poetry’s vast outer side. It activates something to nothing. Perhaps I should say it’s a cloud mill? The place where cloud(poetry) knows but poet(me) doesn’t know.”
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…”
Jane Yeh Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I’m probably drawn to the surreal because I’m easily bored. When I’m in the process of writing a poem, I’m mainly trying to keep myself interested in each line and what might come next, so taking leaps of imagination or language are what I’ve found will most engage my attention.”
Carrie Etter Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“At times it seems the surreal can convey the truth of an experience or emotion most accurately--that only by changing or bending the rules of what's possible can we appreciate how something in the world works.”
Ian Seed Surreal-Absurd Sampler
The absurd-surreal is a form of realism, and, in my case, a confession by other means. My poem-stories seek to unsettle, to entertain, and to move. They revisit memory through dream, imagination and, on occasion, collage. They are as full of yearning as they are of irony. I want you to believe in them.
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…
The never-ending quest…
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