Surreal-Absurd

Ghosts appear in many plays. A long time ago the actor who played the Ghost had to get rid of his body. Only his voice was left. It must have been before someone wearing a white sheet took on the role of the Ghost. The person playing the Ghost had to be a ghost, just as he who plays Macbeth must be Macbeth. The actor killed himself to play the Ghost. He did not realize that once his body was gone, he would lose his voice. He shouted, but no lines were left on stage. He moved, but no action remained on stage. But the audience was listening to his voice. By thinking of the actor who had become a ghost, they themselves became haunted houses.

- Sin Yong-Mok (translated by Brother Anthony)

Surreal-Absurd

I started writing in earnest when I moved to Genoa in 1984. I lived in the Centro Storico, the city within the city, the largest extant medieval settlement in Europe – a labyrinth. I didn’t realise how much the strangeness of the place would get under my skin. Dickens writes about Genoa in Pictures from Italy and his account holds true today - a phantasmagoric interaction between grandeur and squalor.

Surreal-Absurd

I am a tiny despot and my poems are my queendoms, full of palaces and trees just as I choose. They are magical boxes, or very intricate paper pop-ups, or entire carved worlds waiting to be tipped out of a hollowed-out bean. Each one has its own logic and necessariness.

Surreal-Absurd

Andre Breton wrote in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto that “Swift is Surrealist in malice, / Sade is Surrealist in sadism. / Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism.” Lee Sumyeong might be described as being surrealist in the quotidian. The oneiric dimensions of Lee’s poems are characterized less by heterocosmic displacement or absolute logical disseverment that by an intense defamiliarization of the mundane—one sometimes so extreme as to be anti-anthropic in its effects. - Colin Leemarshall

Surreal-Absurd

“Night-gardens erupt across the kitchen window; my body, where you touch it, blossoms tiny white flowers, a purple bruise at the centre of each one. The flare of a red dress at a French lesson. A white spider holds up a white moth, engagingly. The sun speaks. A woman opens her front door to Jesus Christ and ushers him inside. To write poetry at all might be to see what in the world is beautiful because it is absurd.”

Surreal-Absurd

“It doesn’t seem to me true to be one or the other. I think of it as a spectrum and not a binary division of real from surreal or sense from nonsense. I think of it as inclusive, the surreal being part of the real, the real as part of the surreal, the sensical in nonsense and the nonsense in sense, a new sense.”

Surreal-Absurd

As long as I can remember, I have wanted to make a WAR ON HEAVEN, and take back the things that were taken from me.

SURREALISM and ABSURDISM well equip us for a WAR ON HEAVEN.

The tools we need for a reversal of fortunes are right in front of us, easily to hand. We must simply take up the weapons that harm us and REVERSE them. Thus the Surrealist/absurdist logics of reversal, especially of scale, but also of such elements as up and down, big and little, strong and weak, cause and effect-- may-- MUST-- be reversed in the artwork, releasing a scouring bolt that renders the work of art an ENGINE AGAINST THE ALMIGHTY.

• Joyelle McSweeney