John Maradik Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Three poems and two collages from John Maradik, complete with an intro on the surreal.
Rachel B. Glaser Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Six unique and absurd pieces from poet, short story writer, and novelist Rachel B. Glaser, complete with a mini-essay on the surreal.
Laura Wetherington Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Thylias Moss once said to me that the knots and turns in a tree’s branches are all evidence of failures, but in the context of a complex system, they make the tree beautiful and unique. I turned to the trees, first with tree rubbings, and then with collage. I am making new sonnets, visual ones then, in the spirit of Antonin Artaud’s desire to get outside of language.”
Barton Smock Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Highlighting eight surreal/absurd poems from the ever-prolific and often self-published writer Barton Smock, complete with a mini-essay on surrealism and absurdism.
Bill Herbert Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The non-sequiturs of the word paintings in particular set us puzzles we can neither avoid, solve, nor entirely ignore. […] This is surreal in the way John Ashbery is - something appears to be consistent at the same time as engaging with it seems to establish that it is not.”
Julia Rose Lewis Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I suspect my poems appear surreal, because there is significant overlap between the ways in which scientists and surrealists look at the world. Commonsense is backgrounded, in both, curiosity is foregrounded.“
Ian McMillan Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I can more or less remember when I first tried to be surrealistically creative: it was on a church youth club trip to London in around 1969 when I was 13. On the way home my mates and I were spectacularly bored on the rattling bus and I said, apropos of nothing, that when I got home I was going wash my hands in a bowl made from old leather cucumbers when I got home. That collision of leather and cucumbers got a laugh and a surreal door was opened in my mind.”
Sophie Herxheimer Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Surrealism is just a way to cope with the extreme ordinariness and horror of daily life. If we don’t play, it’s like an acceptance of a world in which we eat and dress from a giant monotonous supermarket – we are at the mercy of the chains!”
Dan Power Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“every night i lie in bed and lie and wait until my mind logs off … until my hardware powers down … i don’t know where i go at night or where i go during the day … i think this lack of knowledge is evident in my writing …”
Michael Chang Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The surreal and the absurd are absolutely necessary. […] My work reflects my own thoughts and impressions about what makes people tick. Turns out I find comfort in the “not knowing”.”
Sylee Gore Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Inhale an image, exhale a word. Melt a book to paint a mirror. Buy nothing you can borrow. Refill a song. Place a window somewhere evident. Let muscle overcome memory. Is image a language never needing translation?”
Aaron Kent Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Through surrealism, I write connected to activism, connected to absurdity, and connected to art.”
Yi Won Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A central feature of Yi Won’s work is how she sees the world through images rather than meaning. "This feature makes me want to make my poetic language imagery newer and stranger," Yi Won says…"The irony of the closest thing being the most unfamiliar seems to provide an unfamiliar and familiar image at the same time.”
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.”
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.
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?”
The never-ending quest…
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