Nell Osborne Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A perceptive friend of mine says that my poetry takes place within deep social insanity. I like poetry and prose that behaves outrageously, or antisocially, or which doesn’t “reward” the reader, at least not in familiar or legible ways — I think that’s a personal preference — but it lends itself well to the experience of being alive right now.”
Stuart Ross Surreal-Absurd Sampler
In 1984 I founded a school of writing I called Demento Primitivo. It really caught on, at least among me. The people and other creatures and objects in my poems and stories often push themselves beyond the boundaries of realism and into the dementations of reality. Reality is the bubbling cauldron of absurdity we are flung into. The giant ladle of surrealism stirs us around and around until we capitulate to its nurturing demands.
Heart flattened in an avalanche of odd
These poems are built around the waking moments - the instance when the dream state and wakefulness flip and the whole dreaming hubris gets tossed into a pile in some mental corner like some leftovers.
Surreal-Absurd and the Art of the Prose-Poem
One notable characteristic of the surreal-absurd is a taste for minimalism and prose-poetry, for spinning weird yet resonant yarns in a paragraph or so of poetic prose. Herein lies a selection of such prose poems from the Mercurius archives…
Living in Ukraine These Days
The Ukrainian poet Volodymyr Bilyk recounts his daily life in war-torn Ukraine.
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.”
The never-ending quest…
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