Cassandra Atherton Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My various visits to Japan and love of manga, anime and the kawaii aesthetic have influenced the neo-surreal aspects of my prose poetry. This is epitomised in one of my favourite anime, The Cat Returns (猫の恩返し), where the protagonist saves a cat only to find her reward is to be taken to the Cat Kingdom as the bride of the King of Cats. When she enters the kingdom, she begins to transform into a cat and a clever play on anthropomorphism ensues. I have also often been to the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo and the giant cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ) is another example of the neo-surrealistic Japanese sense of wit and whimsy.
I think of my prose poems as exploring neo-surreal moments. As scholar Andrew Joron points out, the surreal needs redefining in postmodern society because we are so immersed in everyday strangeness that it has become unremarkable. The prose poem form is wonderfully well suited to exploring neo-surrealism in fresh ways. For example, its use of the sentence—which we also use for so many quotidian purposes—rather than the line, has the capacity to heighten a prose poem’s rendering of the extraordinary because of the disjuncture between the familiar mode of address and defamiliarizing poetic tropes. These tropes also gain added energy when pressed between the walls of a fully justified block of text.”—Cassandra Atherton
Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning Australian prose poet. She has published 30 critical and creative books and been invited to edit special editions of leading journals. Cassandra is the successful recipient of many national and international grants including Australia Council, Copyright Agency and VicArts grants and is currently working on a book of prose poetry on the atomic bomb with funding from the Australia Council. Her books of prose poetry include Exhumed, (2016) Trace, (2016) Pre-Raphaelite (2018), Leftovers (2020) and the co-authored Fugitive Letters (2020). She is a commissioning editor of Westerly magazine, series editor for Spineless Wonders Microlit anthologies and associate editor at MadHat Press (USA). She co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne University Press, 2020). She is a Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Melbourne Australia.
