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.
