A Brief Note on Surreal Poetry
Many people equate surrealism only with painting, others know of its sculpture, its film, and even its writings - particularily its automatic prose writings. There is also a tradition of surrealist poetry which probably began with Guillaume Apollinaire in the second decade of this century. His first collection of poems was published in 1912 and illustrated by Raoul Dufy. In the same year, friends were excited by his reading of Eau-de-vie which later became Zone and opened his collection, Alcools, in 1913. His friend, and fellow surrealist poet, Pierre Reverdy, said that surreal poetry has “the bringing together of two remote realities”. Little wonder that Apollinaire’s motto was “I astonish!”
English surreal poets were to seek “the kingdom of the irrational” and were wont to look back at Coleridge, Keats, Lear,and Swinburne with interest. Herbert Read said that surreal poet offered “not a bagful of his own tricks, his idiosyncrasies, but.. knowledge of the secrets.. of the self which are buried in every man alike". Freud and Jung’s discoveries had a deep effect on the surrealists.
When the International Exhibition of Surrealism was staged in London in June 1936, 1,500 people a day attended. Anyone seeking a brief but instructive introduction to this poetic genre could do worse than consult Penguin’s “Surreal Poetry in English”, first published in 1978, who’s fore words offer an interesting discourse on the subject.
The surrealist poet, it is said, sees reality formed from unconscious events; psychosis masked as civilisation is the subject of many of its poems. Reality is entropic and can seek higher forms of probability - where probability means that we do not know for sure.
Edward B. Germain said “The spirit of surrealism has become the spirit of modern poetry: the search for the marvelous; the desire to break through boundaries between subject and object,between desire and reality."
No wonder that Robert Bly, drowned out and ignored at a
Californian poetry reading, walked away shouting “When you
go out of here reality’s not going to be what you think it is".
G.S.
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