Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry: An
Anthology, ed. Tony Kitt
SurVision Books, 2023
Of
all the pioneering avant-garde movements of the last century, Surrealism
inarguably was the most successful in terms of its reach and lasting influence.
Long after Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism have been relegated to museums,
Surrealist groups continue to be active in the United States, Canada,
Argentina, Brazil, the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, and likely elsewhere as
well. Beyond these groups, which are dedicated to carrying out the original
Surrealist program as defined by movement founder and chief theoretician André
Breton, many others—individuals working in various art or art-related
fields—have found in Surrealism a source of ideas, methods, and concerns to be
adopted and adapted, more or less loosely, to their own ends. Contemporary
Tangential Surrealist Poetry, an anthology of recent Surrealist-inspired
poetry largely from the Anglosphere, shows just how fecund and adaptable
Surrealism has been and continues to be as model and inspiration for the poetic
manifestation of language.
As
poet and editor Tony Kitt notes in his introduction, the designation
“Tangential Surrealism” derives from art historian Dickran Tashjian’s
description of a wartime American avant-garde pursuing “goals that were
sometimes derived from, sometimes at odds with, sometimes tangential to”
orthodox Surrealism. By the same token, the forty-two poets from nine countries
included in Kitt’s multigenerational anthology connect with classic Surrealism
in a variety of ways, sometimes closely and sometimes more tangentially. It
isn’t a movement so much as a tendency uniting disparate writers who share a
general relationship to language. Each pursues expressive ends of his or her
own. Some, but by no means all, seem to be explicitly motivated by the pursuit
of classical Surrealism’s main goals—the revelation of the workings of the
mind, the pursuit of the marvelous, the reconciliation of the dream and wakeful
life. And yet just by writing as they do, these poets often do achieve these
ends almost as a matter of course. That’s because, as Kitt describes it, Tangential
Surrealist poetry is poetry grounded in “wonder, intuition, and surprising
connections” embodied in “associative leaps, from word to word, from phrase to
phrase, and from image to image.” The kind of associative logic Kitt describes
is a core element of any kind of Surrealist writing, which leverages analogical
rather than logical thought processes as it cuts a path through language’s
dense forest of symbols.
The
basic unit of Surrealist poetics, the form its associative logic canonically
takes, is the catalytic image: an image made up of spontaneous and logically
incongruous verbal associations which provoke thought by revealing hidden
affinities between seemingly unrelated phenomena. The idea goes back to
Lautreamont’s strange analogies (“beautiful as the chance encounter of an
umbrella and sewing machine on a dissecting table”) as well as to Reverdy’s
definition of the poetic image as the product of the imagined juxtaposition of
two more or less distant realities: the more distant the realities, the truer
and more powerful the poetry of the image. Contemporary Tangential
Surrealist Poetry is replete with such catalytic imagery.
Here,
for example, is the beginning of Angela Cleland’s “Cross,” a poem about a
(real? Metaphorical?) sparring match:
Needling of jabs, riddle
of ducks and feints,
you wait a clear target.
It comes, as brief as a
sparkplug’s discharge,
as a flash of knicker.
The
irregular movements of the boxer’s bobbing and weaving becomes a “riddle”; the
fight itself is a “needling.” The analogy in the second stanza brings together
phenomena from two ontologically distant realms—a sparkplug’s firing and a
fleeting view of an undergarment are two very different things—but they’re
linked analogically by the shared property of momentariness. Similarly, Helen
Ivory’s “The Square of the Clockmaker,” a short poem featuring de Chiricoesque
images of trains, squares, and clocks, plays an arresting game of
one-into-the-other when it sets up an analogy between a train track running
into a tunnel and a tongue rolling up into a mouth. Kitt himself brings
together distant realities in his “A Collage Has a Thousand Mouths” by
analogizing politicians to cathedrals and creating strange compounds like
“matchstick horseracing,” “headwings,” “caterpillar dog,” and “spider flowers.”
Critic
Robert Baker characterized Surrealist writing as embodying an aesthetic of the
extravagant—a wandering beyond the limits of everyday experience. It’s also
extravagant in the plainer sense of lavish. We see this particularly in Will
Alexander’s “Texas Blind Salamander Feelings,” a virtuoso poem that transmutes
the sightless, cave-dwelling amphibian into a marvelous creature whose essence
is defined by what it lacks:
Its sonar glowing
its eyes
inverted aphid’s scrolls
having taken on the tenor
of nautical-turpentine sparks
creeping reptilian polyps
being sulphur as
in-lunation
not unlike flameless snow
fields re-inverting
being the dialectical
polarity
of magma
being molten underground
intarsias
their movement
not unlike the wind from
a primitive whispering axe
That
was just the first stanza. Over the course of the poem Alexander works an
elaborate transvaluation in which the salamander’s sightlessness becomes an
asset, a “sight/not unlike prophecy,” making it a kind of non-human Tiresias in
the underworld.
The
oracular implications of Alexander’s poem bring to mind Surrealist interest in
myth and archetype, as realized in ideas and images drawn from what poet
Clayton Eshelman called “the floor of human imagination.” This strand of
Surrealist or Surrealist-inspired writing was particularly strong in American
poetry of the 1960s and 1970s; it’s represented in the anthology by Jerome
Rothenberg, whose “To Dream Infinity” alludes to cosmogenesis and “the far
look/ of an ancient/ god/ his hands/ ready to bring us/ down.”
Stefania
Heim’s “From Hour Book: 6:35 PM” seems to reach back to Surrealism’s
original efforts to manifest the unfettered workings of the mind through
writing-let-off-the-leash:
Slide projector rain in
the space
of sought solitude.
Wishing
for leaf shadows that are
ever-more
distinct. I came at the
appointed
time, but that time was
in error...
From
a few fragmentary images there emerges the recollection of a mundane
event—showing up at the wrong time—that may have been floating on the surface
of the speaker’s mind at the time of writing. That time is memorialized in the
poem’s title, which names a discrete moment in time, implying that the text
that follows is a record of the unfolding of verbal consciousness in and from
that moment. By putting the non-logical associations of her imagery in the
context of a given moment, Heim shows how, as moments of time coalesce into
words and phrases, time’s sequentiality is put under a microscope that reveals
the fissures and cracks that run through its ostensibly smooth and uniform
flow. Time-as-thought-as-stream of verbal imagery is lumpy in a way that the
everyday, unreflective experience of time generally isn’t.
Charles
Borkhuis, writing with a plainer diction than most, subverts both the form and
conventional wisdom of the cliché as he brings his own critical eye to everyday
experience. His poetry, which engages the limitations and inadequacies of the
existential reality we’re all condemned to inhabit, embodies the kind of dark
humor that was an important element of Surrealism in its early years. “Further
Instructions” advises us that there’s
no need to panic
most ideas only go so far
then someone blows a
whistle
and you pick yourself up
off the ground
maybe we’re not made to
get
to the heart of the
matter
maybe nothing sticks
around that long
This
disillusioned, or better, unillusioned, acknowledgment of where things stand
with us—that we’re hampered by our incomplete knowledge and the inevitable
failures that follow from it--is in its own way an assertion of a strange kind
of pleasure over the reality that would run us into the ground.
These
are only a few samples of what’s in Contemporary Tangential Surrealist
Poetry; there is much more. George Kalamaras’ vivid imagery creates
hallucinatory scenarios in which the imagination is freed from mundane
constraints; Andrew Joron and Andrew Zawacki put stress on disrupting language
at the structural levels of grammar and syntax in order to take Surrealism’s
verbal liberties one radical step beyond; Michael Leong’s intertextual
“Disorientations” uses Surrealist collage to explore issues of identity and
authenticity; Alison Dunhill’s “Cloud Construction” situates itself within the
tradition of the Surrealist prose poem. The one non-Anglophone poet represented
here is the Ukrainian Julia Stakhivska, whose work is translated by Anatoly
Kudryavitsky.
But
this only gives a hint of the imaginative provocations to be had in Kitt’s
anthology. It leaves little doubt that just a little over one hundred years
after its founding, Surrealism and its poetic offshoots continue to thrive and
inspire.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer
in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of
the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work;
his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam
Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi,
Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Open Doors Review,
London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure,
and elsewhere. His essays on poetics have appeared in the books Telling It
Slant (University of Alabama Press), and The World in Time and Space
(Talisman House); he is the author of As Within, So Without, a
collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press. His score Boundary
Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press).
Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.
