Mark Waldron Surreal-Absurd Sampler

“It’s not surrealism but realism that’s the absurdity. It’s a simplistic fantasy of order; a rigid framework pressed onto a surreal universe, so that we might navigate it, and safely get to Tesco and back. The imagination conjures reality out of the gibberish of existence. The surreal is the teeming, bubbling ferment that’s underneath realism. Sometimes I see people write from the perspective of an ‘I’, as though that ‘I’ was something solid, when surely it’s a chaotic chimpanzee’s tea party of unruly characters. That’s what my I is (or my Is are) anyway. Sometimes I put what I’ve written in a poem onto a psychiatrist's couch and get it to own up as to what it’s really on about underneath its put-together surface. It’s always about something other, something more, than I thought it was. The dirty old unconscious is always toiling away down there, cooking up something peculiar and true; day in, day out; night in, night out; which might be turned into a poem.”—Mark Waldron

Mark Waldron has published four poetry collections, his most recent, Sweet, like Rinky-Dink, with Bloodaxe Books in 2019. He was named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society in 2014. In 2018 The Sunday Times listed him among the seven best poetry performers in the UK. He’s been published widely in newspapers and magazines in the UK and the US, and his work has been translated into Spanish, Romanian and Serbian.