The Tale of the Elephant Tail
It is well known that people of means prove their status in society by indulging in luxuries that few can afford. Some may prefer an over-priced artwork by a master, while the more adventurous among us will no doubt include an elephant hunt on their bucket list.
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
A Knife in the Face
Cai Draper flows seamlessly between prose and poetry to recount his days as a kitchen worker. The anger, the stress, the pressure, the long hours and the occasional threats of horrendous violence all laid bare.
Surreal-Absurd Sampler Charles J. March III
Charles J March III gives us a new exegesis of the holy scriptures.
Can Feminism Create a Better World for All People?
Though feminism has often been misinterpreted as a movement that fights for female superiority in a world predominantly structured for men, in recent years, there has been a widespread drive to show that feminism fights for all people regardless of their sex and gender.
Fungi
These visual poems sit on a line between facts and aesthetics. Factual statements about the natural world, in this case about a type of fungi, are cut up randomly, and the resultant prose mixed with photographic images.
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.”
Curators Conversation: Entanglements in Time
‘Entanglements in Time’ is an exhibition at Lewisham Arthouse in London from 6-15 August 2021, showcasing UK-based artists Bart Hajduk, Jasmin Märker, Kristina Pulejkova, Margo Trushina, Solveig Settemsdal and Yambe Tam. Exhibited together for the first time, the works of these artists challenge anthropocentric markers of temporality by examining timelines that stretch far beyond the duration of human existence. On the show’s last days, co-curators Kristine Tan and Mariana Lemos came together to discuss the project.
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.”
Bad For Glass
A deep dive into the literary puddle. Water has long been an elemental trope throughout literature, for the moving target of the swimmer, a medium of agency and transition; for the spectator, a fateful mirror, an abyss that both reflects and absorbs.
Slate Petals, Untravelling, and the Kazimir Effect
Poetry of Life - Project Jupiter
Penteract Press focuses on exploring the structural properties of poetry, promoting innovative constraint-based and visual poetry, as well as works that explore traditional verse forms. This article showcases three Penteract authors: Anthony Etherin, Mary Frances, and Christian Bök.
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). “
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.
The never-ending quest…
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