Raymond Chandler Tries His Hand at Socratic Dialectic
A sampling of poems and prose-poems/flash fiction by Gary Percesepe.
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.
Dream of a Full Neighbourhood
Haiga [paintings] are typically painted by haiku poets (haijin), and often accompanied by a haiku poem, according to Wikipedia. With my photos standing in for the paintings, creating photo-haiga is a central part of my daily art practice: I find it both invigorating and meditative, an often odd, but for me, happy combination. I have found that my photo-haiga can bring some readers closer to the poems.
The Tediophile
The day the Tediophile was born was just like any other day…
Book of Miracles
The Book of Miracles was discovered in a cave in the mountainous province of Girona, Spain. It is written in a language that has long since sunk into the mists of time: the language of the Zohori, an ancient people who once occupied vast swathes of land in and around the Pyrenees but disappeared without a trace circa 1500 BC.
Grey Matter: Three Poems by Adam Steiner
These poems are reimaginings of ordinary everyday scenes dissected into trace elements of sand, brick, flesh, earth and how they become more animated and visceral to the eye if we give them the time of looking and reflection.
Surreal-Absurd Sampler James Knight
This week we have a nice combo. Some psycho-sexual Bird King poems from James Knight and art from Alex Stevens.
The Surprising Abundance of Fire
As he investigates the causes of dissatisfaction in the 21st century, Michael Swatton draws on a wealth of deeply-felt observations that illustrate the dislocation of mind-body-spirit in the hyperreal of the everyday. His tentative solutions gesture towards the curative properties of immersion in nature and the “eternal here”.
Full Game Walkthrough
Full Game Walkthrough is an essay on art and magic with a fictional scenario informed by science fiction and videogame culture. The text explores the conditions that can be produced in integrating fantasy and magic in a digital and fictional setting (a videogame), where things are subject to constant transformation and manipulation. Ultimately, the text explores a magical perception and rendering of reality in the practices of five artists.
Tara's Playground
This is where I had my most powerful experience of unity consciousness, standing on another bridge, overlooking the park, the trees and the grass and the stream dissolving into an ecstatic field of white light, where no single object existed as an individuated presence, and I was there, merging with the radiance as absolute being, pure, undifferentiated awareness.
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Patricia Farrell
Continuing our linguistically innovative thread, this week we have Patricia Farrell. Her work is procedural. Absurd. Bodily.
Enjoy!
No Rent In Heaven
A piece of experimental nonfiction prose
Forrest Gander: At Which Point Without any Lurching Commencement
Be With, 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry, is a deep, blinding and stark book in which the poet recites his pain in the mirror of his wife's death. See below some poems from that authentic and voracious collection, along with a recording I made for The Nude Maja in 2016.
HOW ARE YOU THIS MORNING and other poems
I came across Mercurius through other poets. I am happy to discover the very fine work in the magazine and its open-minded editorial approach. The ideas of transformation and vitality are keen, something we poets hope to achieve. These four recent poems reflect my take on the world at this moment in time.
The Land of Mild Light
The legendary Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas has been admired and acclaimed by Latin American audiences for over half a century while remaining virtually unknown to US and Europe. In The Land of Mild Light, Mercurius editor Nidia Hernandez has assembled Cadenas’ most important poems in vivid translations by some fine English-language poets associated with the US-based Arrowsmith Press.
Shanty Town
A Selection of Asemic Writings.
The Linguistic Eye Scans of Robert Sheppard
This week we delve into the linguistically innovative strand of the surreal-absurd with a poem from Robert Sheppard. It is full immersion.
The Mountain Where Nothing Happens
Poetry of Life - Project Jupiter
The Mountain Where Nothing Happens (Alien Buddha Press) is a conceptual documentary poem sequence with elements of minimalism, surrealism, absurdism, linguistic topography and elemental psychogeography. Join Thomas Helm, step-by-step, as he embarks on a journey to unravel the riddles of consciousness, first in the wilds of the mountain, and then later in the hyperreal city.
On Bladee’s Mallwhore Freestyle
Alex Mazey uses an analysis of the Swedish rapper Bladee as a launchpad for concerns about consumerism, with references to Mark Fisher, Jean Baudrillard, George Ritzer and Jean-Francois Lyotard
NO TOP DOGS
Four Poems by Tim Suermondt
The never-ending quest…
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