BOOK LAUNCH: The 2020s: An Age of Conversation
Today is a proud day for Mercurius, for it is the day we launch our first printed version of the magazine. And wow, what a journey it has been!
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.“
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Adam J. Maynard
“Surrealism and Dada are among the artistic forms that have long fed in to my writing. Gallons of Gertrude Stein, smatterings of Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith. Mouthfuls of Michaux, currents of Kafka and Carrington, Donald Barthelme dropping around for tea.”
Mercurius in Conversation with Chino Moya
Mercurius Editor Thomas Helm asks visionary director Chino Moya about the role of the dystopian narrative in contemporary culture, the artistic response to authoritarianism, creating dream-like narrative structures in stories, Kafka, Beckett, alienation, among other topics....
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Tom Jenks
This week we have the wonderful surrealist/absurdist humour of Tom Jenks. Everyday wonders with fabulist elements. Llamas and whales and kings and waffles!
Waiting on a Padded Abyss
Influenced by such widely disparate sources as Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel, animation, video games and the Japanese Yōkai spirits, José Castiella’s works are the result of pure chance at the same time as an attempt at controlling the process as it unfolds.
Cosmologgorhea
Cosmologgorhea began as a collaborative twitter creative word game with Richard Biddle (also a Mercurius contributor), and has evolved into a combination of fragmented texts and visual poems, with each of us creating several vispos.
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.
The never-ending quest…
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