Jeff Hilson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My poems court the absurd in that they’re incongruous, at times silly, and frequently out of tune (from the Latin absurdus) – think The Residents’ Commercial Album, Heinrich Ignatz Franz von Biber’s scordatura tuning for the Rosary Sonatas, as well as The Shaggs…”
Maria Sledmere Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My poetry is made from dream paste, shimmer artifice of momentary disturbance. I like that surrealism is about connection and rupture, copying, aporia. I always felt my soul was pretty alien.”
Chris Gutkind Surreal-Absurd
I feel my work is utterly real, in itself and what it refers to in myself or in the world outside myself, but to make it real I may use the unreal or strange or impossible, an old working truth of poetry and all art, that's always been one of its main practices, and a very effective one when done well, making us see and feel the world anew and more deeply than before, adding to the thickness and complexity of the real, and as many have said: art lies to tell the truth
Anne-Laure Coxam Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Love is surreal, surreal is love” - to divert John Lennon’s line (big words! what’s love, what’s surreal?). These poems (what’s a poem?) emerged from an accident, the accident of opening a territory and the accident of venturing into this new intimate territory where two bodies touching and two subconscious minds clinking against each other is full of dangers and an endless surprise.
Kristin Bock Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A successful surreal poem makes the magic happen inside the reader. Strangeness or dream logic can sneak past our rational sensors and scream through us like lightning.”
II
An excerpt from Michael Salu's work in progress novel “II”
william erickson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Surreal-Absurd
“I like to say the same things over and over—but spelled different. Have you noticed?” Sharing the work & surreal-absurd outlook of PNW poet william erickson.
As-if or As-Is: A Cretan Encounter
On a quest for the skull we enter Aghios Titos, sit on a back bench in the main chamber and survey the interior. In the center a wagon-wheel chandelier of filigreed olive wood, inset with foot-high stained-glass portraits of saints, topped by as-yet unlit (electric) candles.
Saw My Soul on the Side of the Road
I feel the constant business of life chip away at any wonder and curiosity in a concept like the soul. Connecting to spiritual ideas feels close to impossible in the scheduled days. The desire to progress in a world that doesn’t value something like the soul ends up meaning less priority to spirituality.
Unspeakable: Asemic mail collaboration
An asemic mail collaboration
Bête Noire
A selection of visual poems
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Improvisation, chance, surprise, wild leaps, dream-logic, these are the overriding principles. Resistance to where the brain wants to default. Which is to wake up and start talking like a college-admissions essay. Yuck, am I right?”
Sin Yong-Mok Surreal-Absurd Sampler
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)
Julian Stannard Surreal-Absurd Sampler
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.
Natalie Shaw Surreal-Absurd Sampler
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.
The Prospects and Problems of Post-Bovine Man
When the first human chose to crawl under an aurochs to suckle at its teat, s/he did so in a state of starvation and desperation. It was this act of desperation that led humanity into a contract of mutual dependency with cattle.
Lee Sumyeong Surreal-Absurd Sampler
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
There’s Nothing to Be Done
A visual poem.
On Plastics
A Factual, Poetic, and Spiritual Look at the Plastics Predicament. An excerpt from The Orgastic Future
Ailbhe Darcy Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“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.”
The never-ending quest…
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