I can’t handle surrealist poetry. It slips out of my hands.
I remember when Eleanor and I sat in a hammock together during 20th Century American Fiction. We loved Professor Scanlan, but we still wrote poetry during class.
Eleanor cast a line. I cast mine. Her words were pickerel hiding in the grass. Mine were troutlets congregating in gravely riffles. Together, we dangled our Bics over a brown river of vending machine coffee and watched an angry bear on the opposite shore. Slighted, Hulga pawed and pawed after her missing leg.
“Give me my leg.”
From the back of the classroom, we listened to that good Christian boy kiss her missing leg. He made horrible noises, like a fish, as he did it.
Nick Adams might have blinked. Maybe. He saw it happen, anyhow. But he kept fishing. He knew how to cast a good line from the safety of a rhomboid tank, and the whole thing was “very satisfactory, ” he said. Even Quintin Compson, who breathed quite heavily in the darkness, said he didn’t hate it.
Eventually, the wars ended like college. Lots of grey smoke and promissory notes. I carried my tackle box home, and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets always smelled of worms. But once our grasshoppers were behind us, we all lost touch.
We built a bridge last week. Across the Assiniboine. The meandering river runs as a tributary through Osborne Village, a big-hearted enclave of art here in Winnipeg. The bridge is a “surprisingly delicate concrete-and-aluminum poem, ” according to one CBC reviewer.
While we sleep inside simple quadrilaterals, herds of bison fly over our heads at 55 Nassau Street. “You better go fishing, ” they tell us. “The stones are hot, ready for cooking.”
But how do you cook a surrealist poem? How do you even catch it? That’s what I want to know.
I watch the village artists, how they gather anecdotes, hopes and dreams from the neighbourhood and arrange this native text on aluminum plates, upon which the dead fish stare back at us with back lit LED eyes.
When an artist feels a peculiar hunger, he might scale and gut images with a dull knife and then butterfly them with a sharp knife. This can look quite disturbing at times. He needs to hold his messy, disparate pieces together and balance the elephants with the melting pocket watches.
And so surrealism takes us fishing and carries a license to pull up whatever it finds. But perhaps surrealism can also be a taut, invisible line, which stretches us across a well-meaning bridge. And then pulls us under.
Photo by Derrick T., Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Matthew Kreider.
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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $5.99— Read a poem a day, become a better writer. In November we’re exploring the theme Surrealism.
- Casting a Line for Surrealist Poetry - November 12, 2012
- The History of the World in Beer - October 22, 2012
- Journey into Poetry: Matthew Kreider - July 23, 2012
Maureen Doallas says
A fine post, Matt.
I’m not convinced surrealist poetry exists. If the idea is to write “automatically”, letting the unconscious loose, ok, except that becomes a deliberative act once you decide to “be unconscious”. I feel like I’m on a guinea pig wheel, and the wheel keeps taking me into and out of the same dark tunnel.
There are a dozen poems at this link that supposedly quality as “surrealist poems”. To me, they’re simply marvelous examples of what can be done with image and metaphor and simile. If Lorca was “unconscious” while he was writing the poems featured here, I’d like a drink of whatever he had.
http://www.surrealism-plays.com/surrealistpoems.html
Dana Gioia has a piece on his site titled James Tate and American Surrealism. Gioia points out there were “many reasons why surrealism was so slow in coming to America….” He posits that Hollywood got there first.
Matthew Kreider says
I know what you mean, Maureen, though maybe I feel more like a guinea pig transitioning from a pirouette to a cabriole. To really dance, surrealism needs a bit of balance and logic, don’t you think? Otherwise, we move like Sylvie Guillem after too much drink.
I’ll have to visit Gioia’s site for that read. Thanks for the tip. And for your comment here. 🙂
Donna says
So glad to see that question that begins BUT HOW???? I also want to know!! I have come up with a rule of thumb: if it doesn’t make much sense then I am doing something right. The funny thing is that the surrealist poem or piece I think I have written is only surreal until I reread it once or twice. Then I realize where it really came from, and to me it makes perfect sense – which I guess knocks it right out of the pool. But it’s fun and expands my thinking and gives me a focus, as long as I don’t try and hold myself to “it”. I appreciate this chance to look at and play with something that is new for me, too.
I really love the way you ended this: surrealism takes us fishing and carries a license to pull up whatever it finds. But perhaps surrealism can also be a taut, invisible line, which stretches us across a well-meaning bridge. And then pulls us under.
Matthew Kreider says
That willingness to play is so important, Donna. It wakes up to gift, discovery, even mystery. Thanks for your comment!
Matthew Kreider says
It wakes *us* up. 🙂
Joy says
I’ve been thinking along those lines ever since I tried to attempt one last week. It’s a dance between the abstract and the absurd- and doesn’t all poetry flit between those at some points?
You’ve given me a lot to think about. Not sure that’ll I get brave enough to try again, but plenty to consider!
Matthew Kreider says
Here’s my problem: if I’d stop thinking so much and just dance, I’d write a lot more poetry. Here’s to hoping both of us can be brave enough to keep trying. We can always count on Tweetspeak to invite us onto the dance floor. We just have to say yes. 🙂
Maureen Doallas says
There’s a post up today at BestAmPo about surrealist poet Joyce Mansour:
http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/11/how-strange-familiar-things-can-be-celebrating-joyce-mansour.html
Maureen Doallas says
After reading the article, what I’m appreciating about the surrealist poets is the stunning imagery that results amid language that is not over-thought. It is not language without meaning; I’d maybe even argue that meaning is more potent because of the images rendered. For example, Mansour’s ‘Handsome Monster’ is incredible; its opening line is “Sickness with its floating moustache”.
And now I’m inspired to try to write something worthy of the label surrealist poetry.
Maureen Doallas says
Ok, here’s my surrealist poem for the week:
Cortege
after Leonor Fini’s Cortege
A cortege of birds —
their u-shaped beaks like cups
full of shadows, their
eyes popping green beads
filling streets running
with the sun’s tears,
hissing soles on fire —
skids across the night’s sky.
The sky sharpens its face
burning red-orange into black
-tipped stars.
The stars practice pirouettes
while the clouds scream
their adieu, adieu.
Wings puffed like clouds lift
the veils before dipping into a sea
still salting shelves of empty shells.
A scaffold of shells shelters our farewells.
———
Leonor Fini, I should add, is a favorite artist of mine. I have several of her serigraphs. To see her “Cortege”, go here:
http://www.cfmgallery.com/Leonor-Fini/Cortege.htm
Maureen Doallas says
The line after the title should be indented. I have no idea how to do that here.
Matthew Kreider says
I’m floating here, Maureen, and it feels like flying.
Makes me consider how a moving image can leave streaks and smears. They smudge, intersect, form new patterns
You’re right: we don’t have to over-think the images. Find good ones, spin them, and just let the stars be stars, practicing their pirouettes. I hope you play more with this label.
At lunch, I asked my four-year-old son to write a poem. Told him I’d dictate. His first line: “Your eyeballs walked on top of your head.”
Maureen Doallas says
Oh, your son’s already a poet! Give him a high-five for me.
In some ways, given all the fantastical videos my son and now yours have or are growing up with, I think they think in images more readily than most of us have ever managed. My son writes rap/hip hop; he has a great ear for language and music and his lyrics often leave me in awe because they’re complicated plays on words.
Donna says
Wow.