David Spittle Surreal-Absurd Sampler

This week we have a spotlight on Surrealism, courtesy of filmmaker, poet and essayist, David Spittle, who holds a PhD in John Ashbery and Surrealism. Here is his statement:

Surrealism is a gateway, or permission, through which we can better understand our own ways of understanding and how often they are stifled or politely domesticated in learnt behaviours – ideologically exiled into the hidden, sublimated or repressed. Whatever ‘it’ is should not be confined to definitions of a historicized past, anchored in the validation of a movement, or located in a code of aesthetics, Surrealism is (for me) instead encountered in the articulation of experience and the experience of articulation. I think Surrealism was, and is, a kind of spark with which experience and language seems differently illuminated, and that, far from being exclusive to the territory of one demarcated ‘ism’, it is more profoundly part of the human attempt to express and experience whatever it is that constitutes life. Consequently, it is never singular or static but a necessarily playful and mobile spirit. It collides with and inhabits philosophy, politics, psychology, art in all its forms, friendship, sexuality and, with a more playful and messy insistence, the dumb and searching vitality of being lost, confused, incomplete and surprised. The stuff of wonder and terror as well as the overlooked and incidental. Given to paradox, ridiculous claims, hypocrisy, ecstatic insight and belligerent contradiction. It can be the initiation of a celebrated simultaneity, one in the other, as both a soaring everything and a howling nothing. However, above all, I like to think of it as a mode of attention towards perception and what is perceived that reveals waking reality – when really looked at and turned over – as a kind of dreaming.

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David Spittle is a poet, filmmaker, and essayist. His first full collection, All Particles and Waves was published by Black Herald Press (2020), following the pamphlet, B O X (HVTN, 2018). Light Glyphs, a book of interviews with filmmakers on poetry and poets on film is now out with Broken Sleep. A new collection of poetry, Rubbles, is forthcoming with Broken Sleep in 2022.

Light Glyphs ; All Particles and Waves ; B O X

Spittle’s first short film, Light Noise (2019), was funded and broadcast by the BBC and is now available to watch on iPlayer. In 2020 he was commissioned to make an experimental documentary on poetry and the pandemic by the Austrian Cultural Forum, Where Is Everyone Austria. Spittle holds a Literature PhD on the poetry of John Ashbery and Surrealism. His films are on Vimeo. Twitter: @DavidSpittle7