Maria Sledmere Surreal-Absurd Sampler

“Dissonance, dream and play are disorganising principles of language. I don’t own them; they (dis)own me. What ‘I’ speaks is a planet-sized swallowing: grammatical blisters, ugh, ideas that swell up overnight. Poetry says don’t pop them don’t pop them. Poetry can’t resist, like the white ‘paste’ come out of Lispector’s cockroach. I can’t help going to eat what will kill me so I collect words like so much emulsion of the breath speak marsh of my Martian tongue.

So much of this daily (administrative) life is corrosive to the poetic and yet it already was poetical, absurd, a lavish dose of non-sequiturs and impossible metaphysical demand. Ineluctable secrets in every spreadsheet, special etcetera. I don’t know what realism is any more and the over and above of ‘sur’ is so much where I’m at – excess – the slant I sort of drunken digital stitch of being more than binary. The ‘sur’ as supplement to the real in Derrida’s sense of the supplement as both ‘addition’ (surplus) and replacement – language cast into the void and filling and melting its psychic snow. ‘The supplement is maddening’, says Derrida, because it is neither presence nor absence’. Whomst can relate to that? Not I (I).

I don’t know what’s real anymore, before or ever-after. ‘Only ghosts like me can see ghosts’, was a mishearing of a yeule song that brought me intimately to the breath before I heard their voice. Sometimes I miss when everything on the internet ‘buffered’ because the grammatology of that elliptical hold (wait) and transition (duration) kept content closer to the speed of what we could see of it. Burroughs said that ‘Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up’. It’s also total fuck up, beyond the singular. Surrealism is our realism. As a baby millennial, I used to cut things out of magazines until the very act became so seamless, we no longer needed to cut: we just clicked. A thousand years passed every day. It made perfect sense that Nelly would try to reach her lover through Microsoft Excel, and that parataxis would teach sexuality and synaesthesia would set me free. 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. I’m not saying I knew this from sleeping. I hardly ever sleep like that. Dream-writing is the lingua franca between love and the elements, mentions, interiority, extinction, time, the gift, humours, the moon & sun. Time lived in rainbow. Many-many-many-hued-memories. The impossible end of them. ‘It has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of full satisfaction has not yet come’(Jameson).”

—Maria Sledmere

Bio

Maria Sledmere is an artist, poet and lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. Her next poetry collection is Cinders, forthcoming from KRUPSKAYA Books in February 2024.