Notwithstanding all that, I was incautious
enough to dub one of my chapbooks of poems What
Surrealism Means to Me, which led directly to the invitation to deliver this
lecture on surrealism and contemporary poetry. The “–critic” is thus called to account
for the effusions of the “poet–,” for I have hitherto never self-identified as a
surrealist; rather, in the late ’90s, along with my friends Jeff Clark and Brian
Lucas, I was accused by a largely forgotten academic of being a surrealist. (I think
we were called, derisively, the San Francisco Surrealists.) I can’t speak for my
confreres, but for my part, I wouldn’t have presumed to call myself a surrealist,
because I took surrealism seriously. While I never held it against those who identified
as surrealists, nor did I ever disavow surrealism, at the same time, I felt that
calling yourself a surrealist had little bearing on whether or not you could achieve
surrealism. Such discretion aside, however, the accusation has more or less stuck
and my poetry, insofar as it’s thought about at all, tends to be considered surrealist.
Nonetheless, publishing the aforementioned
chapbook under the rubric of surrealism wasn’t a question of “giving in” to the
label, but was rather a deliberate decision, as indicated by “Selfie at Delphi,”
the poem-manifesto that opens What Surrealism
Means to Me:
when
i was a young poet, there was all this postmodern distance & irony i couldn’t
abide. everyone was great at deriding what they disliked & everyone sucked at
deciding what they liked. now that i’m a middle-aged poet, everyone’s vampiric,
parasitic, cannibal, in the name of a look-at-me-ism that mistakes the clever for
the conceptual: poetry as selfie.
what
surrealism has done for me is provide dissident perspective on what otherwise nice,
even reasonable employees of museums & universities tell me is cutting-edge,
avant-garde, true. a spine to speak get the fuck outta here & an intelligence
to back it up. surrealism’s been the light leading me through continuous yet temporary
labyrinths & if you think i lit this rush from Lamantia who lit his from Breton,
you’re fucking right. [2]
On the one hand, I suppose, this looks for
all the world like a midlife crisis; certainly I would never have carried on in
this fashion in my youth. Back then, I wouldn’t have permitted myself in a poetic
text to write so prosaically, nor would I have spoken of my own poetry so directly
or invoked surrealism so explicitly. And I definitely wouldn’t have had the grandiosity
to propose this lineage from Breton to Lamantia to myself. Yet here is where I find
myself. What’s shifted is the context of the discussion in the poetic avant-garde.
When I came of age as a poet, the avant-garde in the Bay Area was dominated by language
poetry; there was a stifling orthodoxy to the conversation and it was theory-driven
at the expense of poetic results. The way to change this conversation was not by
writing manifestoes, for language poetry was only too ready to argue, but rather
by writing more compelling poetry. If my friends and I had any impact on poetry
in terms of younger writers, it was through example, by suggesting other avenues
in experimental poetry than those sanctioned by language poetry.
The situation today could be no more different,
to the point where I feel a mild nostalgia for language poetry; however wrongheaded
I found them, the language poets were worthy opponents, and they were nothing if
not sincere. Rightly or, as I maintain, wrongly, they were committed to their ideas
and the poetry that flowed therefrom. With the subsequent poetry of conceptualism,
however, we are confronted with a whole new animal, one that doesn’t even pretend
to believe what it says. As near as I can tell, it began as a cynical land-grab
by failed visual artists, using a warmed over version of turn of ’70s minimalism
as a way to take out their frustrations about their creative impotence, hence the
valorization of “uncreative writing.” It is, on the one hand, all about product,
ways of generating product with minimal effort, and in this we can see its academic
origins, for this is surely the cut-and-paste solution to the professor’s publish-or-perish
problem. On the other hand, it disavows its product, insofar as the texts of conceptualism
are self-declaredly meant to be discussed, not read. Conceptualism will do anything
for attention, because attention is its only goal. It will not hesitate to engage
in the worst forms of ambulance chasing and grave robbing, whether attaching its
projects to the suicide of open access activist Aaron Swartz or publishing a remix
of the manifesto of mass murderer Elliot Rodger a mere two days after his killing
spree. In this, it’s the ultimate symptom of the social media age, and social media
has had a pernicious effect on the poetry world. [3] A bubbling cauldron of clickbait and petty
resentments, social media has created a permanent MFA class of poet, one concerned
chiefly with parsing the activities of his or her peers as opposed to pursuing the
ancient art we profess to practice. Poetry is elsewhere.
But why invoke something as unfashionable
as surrealism to oppose conceptualism? As a poet, I always feel the need to do the
unfashionable thing, because poetry is the antithesis of fashion. Where conceptualism
avidly cultivates the rewards of fashionability – poet laureateships, invitations
to the White House, and other symbols of acceptance by the status quo – surrealism
seeks nothing less than permanent revolution. And though it has had its periods
of vogue, surrealism is beyond fashion, because surrealism is real, even as it aspires
to integrate the real and the dream. The genius of Breton as the leader of an avant-garde
movement was that he posited surrealism as something objective, beyond the movement
itself, something the movement investigated and attuned itself to. Surrealism is
nothing less than a tendency within (and even sometimes beyond) human consciousness,
stretching back to prehistory, as is evident from the surviving art of the Upper
Paleolithic period, the caves of Chauvet and Lascaux, say, or the Venus of Hohle
Fels, or the Lion Man of Hohlenstein Stadel, even as it extends to the present,
which in Breton’s case might include, say, the paintings of Leonora Carrington,
the photographs of Pierre Molinier, the boxes of Joseph Cornell, or the poems of
Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude. Surrealism, moreover, isn’t confined to art but rather
has made itself felt in anthropology, history, philosophy, and politics. Proof of
surrealism’s substance may be seen in how quickly and successfully it was adapted
to the degraded, everyday use of the word surreal
to signify something impossible, uncanny, or absurd. Breton’s elaboration of surrealism,
in other words, responded to a deeply felt human necessity, one positing a thread
(the marvelous) connecting objective phenomena
like the Northern Lights to the most subjective constructions like Charles Fourier’s
utopian socialism, the pop cultural domain of Louis Feuillade’s films to the high
art occultation of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant
donnés. As such diverse manifestations show, surrealism is neither
a method nor a style and its practice thus can’t be taught. It proceeds fundamentally
by analogy and eludes a logical explication of the relationship among its various
forms and concerns, even as it posits their unity through its very name.
The reality of surrealism is what makes
it possible today, even in the absence of a coherent movement and in contradistinction
to all of the competing contemporaneous avant-gardes from the modernist era. It’s
this reality I invoke in opposition to conceptualism, by way of explaining what
What Surrealism Means to Me means to me.
But what does surrealism mean to me, or rather, what do I mean by surrealism? In a way, this is a question
for another day, inasmuch as this lecture presupposes surrealism. Nonetheless, it
would do to sketch some of surrealism’s core tenets, beginning with the definition
first put forward by Breton in the “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924):
SURREALISM,
n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally,
by means of the written, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought.
Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from
any aesthetic or moral concern.
ENCYCLOPEDIA.
Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the superior reality of certain forms of previously
neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of
thought.
[4]
To his credit, Breton quickly realized that
the “revolution of the mind” he proposed was ultimately impossible to attain if
it were divorced from social revolution, and thus he weds to “pure psychic automatism”
the Marxist concept of “permanent revolution.” Indeed, Breton’s version of this
concept is ultimately more radical than that of its chief elaborator, Leon Trotsky,
for where Trotsky insisted permanent revolution culminated (and therefore ended)
in the creation of a worldwide classless society, [5] Breton insisted that such an achievement
was only the beginning; his permanent revolution was necessarily permanent. For Breton,
“permanent revolution” means “the complete freedom of art,” “an anarchist regime
of individual liberty” for “intellectual creation,” [6] as well as an “unlimited capacity
to say no” to any orthodoxy, “the free statement of all points of view and
the permanent confrontation of all tendencies.” [7] Always relative to the society in which it finds itself,
surrealism is not a static philosophy but rather simultaneously a perspective, a
position, a critique, a dialectic, a contradiction, and a rejection.
The real question here, however, is not
what does surrealism mean, but rather, what could
it mean in relation to contemporary poetry? And I imagine there is some desire on
the part of my hosts that I name names, in the sense of identifying a body of contemporary
work that I consider definitively surrealist. But I find myself reluctant to do
this. Part of this reluctance stems from the difficulty of fully parsing the relationship
between surrealism and poetry, because surrealism identifies so much of itself with
poetry. This is perhaps no shock, given that its elaboration begins at the hands
of a group of poets. As it is an attempt to integrate the real with the dream, so
too is surrealism an attempt to infuse reality with poetry, by attending to those
phenomena deemed irrational, like chance, coincidence, love. This impulse reaches
an apotheosis in Breton’s work in Mad Love
(1937), during the “Night of the Sunflower” episode, where the details from a poem
he had written years before and later discarded begin to enact themselves before
his eyes on the night he meets the woman who would become his second wife, the painter
Jacqueline Lamba. From this episode and similar ones, Breton elaborates the concept
of objective chance, as the manifestation
of subjective desire in the events of the objective world.
The relationship between surrealism and
poetry, moreover, is so tight that it affects all other forms of surrealist art.
Take, for example, painting. Where most accounts of modernism locate the central
conflict of avant-garde painting in the opposition between abstraction and representation,
surrealism refuses this opposition altogether. Throughout 20th Century
art history, surrealist painting is continually accused of narrative, but this is wrong. Surrealist painting is primarily concerned
with the poetic, and the struggle of avant-garde
painting for surrealism is between the poetic and what Duchamp termed the retinal.
Abstraction and representation are just two modes, either or both of which may be
used in the service of a poetic way of seeing, while retinal art is chiefly an appeal
to the eye, whether abstract, like a purely decorative pattern, or representational,
like a merely photographically accurate portrait. This is not to say surrealist
painting necessarily doesn’t make an appeal to the eye – some of it does, some of
it doesn’t – but rather to say that its primary appeal is to the imagination.
The introduction of so unfashionable a term
as “imagination” into our lecture at this point is highly convenient, insofar as
that term serves to differentiate surrealism and poetry. That is to say, the fact
that poetry is so fundamental to surrealism doesn’t mean that poetry and surrealism
are identical or that one is reducible to the other. Indeed, much of the poetry
I read and love can’t be said to be surrealist and comparatively few of the poets
I roll with personally identify as such. Yet the poets I read and/or associate with
tend to be highly imaginative ones as opposed to, say, autobiographical poets or
theory poets or process poets or, god forbid, conceptual poets. And the higher you
crank the imagination dial in poetry, the greater the likelihood the resulting poem
is going to cross the line into surrealism.
Let me give you some examples of what I
mean here. When I was writing this lecture, I was editing a book of poems for City
Lights, Women in Public, by Elaine Kahn.
As far as I know, Kahn primarily identifies as an artist, given that she works in multiple media, most notably music and
poetry. I feel like surrealism as such is remote from her concerns. And yet, the
moments of her poetry that have truly blown me away have been those explosions of
surrealism within it. I’m thinking of a sequence like the following three lines
of “Like the Shadow of a Boat,” “In Marseille / I am cutting myself / out of a piece
of paper,”
[8] where Kahn gestures to Women in Public’s overarching themes of the
body and femininity in the second line’s suggestion of self-mutilation, only to
spin it on its head with its reinterpretation by the third line, in which she asserts
her agency in a surrealistic shaping of herself. Or too, witness the mental gymnastics
required to negotiate a couplet like “I’d like to fuck myself so hard / I get pregnant
and give birth to me” from “Self-Love/The Empress.” [9] It’s one thing to either fuck oneself or
give birth to oneself, but quite another thing to connect these two idioms by the
idea of knocking oneself up. This impossible splitting of the “I” into three – the
one fucking, the one getting fucked, and the one conceived by the fucking – displays
sufficient force of imagination to be labeled surrealist.
Another example: when I was writing this
lecture, I was reading an unpublished manuscript of poems by Frank Lima. This manuscript
became the basis for Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems
(2015). As a student of Kenneth Koch, a protégé of Frank O’Hara, and a close associate
of such poets as David Shapiro and Joseph Ceravolo, Lima is generally and correctly
identified as a New York School poet, though I was gratified to reread Shapiro’s
introduction to Inventory: New & Selected
Poems and find him calling his friend a “New York Surrealist.” [10] As Shapiro notes, the painter Sherman Drexler
first gave a teenaged Lima the advice “to write the way he spoke,” [11] which would seem quite in line with the
quotidian poetics of his future mentor O’Hara. Yet too, alongside this quotidian
impulse, there has always been a strong surrealist proclivity among the poets of
the New York School, and Shapiro in his introduction charts the development of his
friend’s poetry from the “snapshot aesthetic of Robert Frank” to a “colli[sion]
with the possibilities of a kind of historical or historicized surrealism.” [12] By “historical or historicized,” I take
Shapiro to mean that Lima wasn’t running around claiming surrealism but rather was
influenced by it. Yet Lima’s later work is almost completely saturated with surrealism,
such as the following extract from 2001, selected more or less at random from a
manuscript filled with such poetry:
I own
them, Basilicas, white bearded dictionaries that hoard words made
Of gold
and silver letters, great paintings of bucolic countryside that
Reflect
a past epoch of peace. We are tethered to this ancient vision for
The rest
of our squalid days of imitations and inbreeding consonants and
Commas.
We stand when the undrinkable hearts are mentioned:
There
is only one way of breathing into someone’s heart that few people
Accept
because flesh is the exoskeleton of intimacy. We were never
Prepared
for the silence so suddenly. We are lost as public students;
We are
monsters with one eye, shaped like illuminated Chaucerian
Dictionaries.
We shall always be our own crisscrossing words on blank
Musical
pages at the endless antipasto party in our honor. [13]
For a third example, let me mention another
book I worked on for City Lights, The Tranquilized
Tongue by Eric Baus. Having begun his education as a poet under the redoubtable
eye of George Kalamaris, Baus emerges from an explicitly surrealist lineage, and
while he’s conducted himself with a discretion similar to or even greater than my
own in that he has not used the label to legitimize or promote his work, his connection
to surrealism is perhaps the most pronounced among the three poets under discussion.
Taking its epigraphs from Pierre Reverdy and Francis Ponge, The Tranquilized Tongue is a series of short,
almost aphoristic poems, chiefly though not exclusively written in short paragraphs
of declarative sentences. Allow me to quote two poems here in full:
The Injured
Window
The wires
inside sleep blurred between the feigned body that evades one during sleep and the
precise moment sleep awakens. [15]
The Feral
Film
The tidal
nerves were moon-burnt at birth. The grass the doves grew inverted the canopy. The
stunned deer fished for glass oxen. The ur-creature’s escape elongated the animals.
The statue stirred its ghost in a jar. [16]
These examples are reasonably typical of
the poetry of The Tranquilized Tongue;
sometimes, like “The Injured Window,” a poem might run only a sentence long (or
even less, in the case of fragmentary pieces like “The Flicker’s Skin” or “The Ambushed
Book”).
[17] More often, like “The Feral Film,” a poem
will deliver a series of sentences of uncertain relation to one another. Baus’s
poetry here is less conversational than Lima’s, but there’s a similar displacement
of action from the surrealist image to the relations among the words themselves,
giving rise to a series of what we might call anti-images. That is, there’s virtually nothing visualizable in “The
Feral Film.” In the first sentence, even if we knew what “tidal nerves” meant, “tidal”
is unseeable by definition, by virtue of being an ongoing, cyclical process. “Moon-burnt”
we can only analogize to sunburnt, but
we have no logical grounds on which to picture a moonburn – is it red like a sunburn or luminous and pearlescent like
the moon itself – even, again, if we did have an idea of what “tidal nerves” meant,
or what their “birth” might entail. The second sentence doesn’t elaborate on the
first but rather begins anew, not with doves growing grass, but with that already
dove-grown grass “invert[ing] the canopy.” Baus is always one step ahead of the
image, for the poem has already moved on through sheer force of syntax before an
image can even coalesce.
This tendency toward what I’ve called the
anti-image links Baus’s work to a lineage
descending from the poetry of the great American master of surrealism, Philip Lamantia,
and cross-pollinated, to a lesser or greater extent, with the New York School strain
of surrealism typified by Barbara Guest and John Ashbery. Emerging during the period
of language poetry’s avant-garde hegemony, this tendency moves away from the image
toward an investigation of the radical opacity of the signifying system – the materiality
of language that so fascinated and flummoxed language poetry – and insists such
investigation is fully congruent with imagination, inspiration, originality, dream,
trance, affect, and any of a number of then-despised notions from the cabinet of
romanticism. Perhaps the two supreme exemplars of this tendency – which I once referred
to in a book review as surrealism of the word
– are Will Alexander and Andrew Joron. Yet their work could be no more distinct
from each other’s. Much of Alexander’s poetry is automatic, dictated, in true surrealist
fashion, but the form this dictation takes is utterly different from all prior surrealist
poetry. For at the same time his writing is automatic, it is also the consummate
bricolage, furiously composed of words that hardly resemble the diction of everyday
speech, scientific terms and obscure vocabularies that reflect his reading in ecological,
astronomical, and esoteric subjects. The alien words of Alexander’s researches
enter his unconscious only to reemerge in strange, fantastic combinations that fundamentally
resist imagery, even when they are occasionally defined in glossaries at the end
of his books. They resonate more on the level of feeling than sense – “the grey
corruptive prisms of ‘Bolometric Luminosity’” [18] – although often the senses of less
remote individual words resonate against each other: “optimum cobalt spectrum.”
[19] The
meanings of these phrases are impenetrable, yet the first is clearly negative, the
second positive, and only through such seemingly trivial clues can you navigate
his poetry. Often his poems are long, and their effect is cumulative even though
the poems themselves are not. There is no linear narrative, no information that
can be retained after a line or a stanza passes except in terms of a frequent invocation
of the subject or subject matter the poem addresses.
If Alexander
is the bricoleur, assembling vast structures out of materials drawn from his researches,
Andrew Joron is the forensic scientist, dissecting with the scalpel and examining
through the microscope. Joron probes deep into words; he is at once the chess master,
rearranging their constituent letters, and the sound mirror, uniting conflicting
senses in the same phonemes. We might illustrate this with one of the more celebrated
and paradigmatic passages from his poetry: “The pilot alone knows / That the plot
is missing its / Eye.” [20] Here the letters and phonemes drive the poem along,
the one word (“pilot”) splitting into two (“plot”, “Eye”) and positing a relationship
between them. The word and its double are two poles he sets up to spark electricity
between them, and his truly speculative provocation of chance places his work at
the intersection of science and magic. Witness his ability to conjure words that aren’t even on the page
in these excerpts from his abecedarium, “Absolute Black Continuum”:
F
face
final line.
G
ode,
crystal-encrusted, stressed structure to chime.
...
L
a mental
metal. Untooled, untold.
...
Q
bed,
the bound of sound, sole solid of air.
...
X
isle
of beauty. A soiled boot. A boat that sails into the sun. [21]
If this focus
on the materiality of language seems somehow at odds with, or even a diminishment
of, the social and psychological aspirations of Breton’s surrealist movement, I
beg to differ, as would Breton himself. In 1929, for example, at the height of surrealism’s
ultimately unsuccessful struggle to integrate itself with the French communist party,
Breton insists in the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” that:
The problem
of social action, I would like to repeat and to stress at this point, is only one
of the forms of a more general problem which Surrealism set out to deal with, and
that is the problem of human expression in all its
forms. Whoever speaks of expression speaks
of language first and foremost. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone
to see Surrealism almost exclusively concerned with the question of language at
first, nor should it surprise anyone to see it return to language, after some foray
into another area, as though for the pleasure of traveling in conquered territory. [22]
If anything,
as Breton suggests here, surrealism of the
word is a return to fundamentals, as well as a response to the changing conception
of language in the 45 years since the original group disbanded. And too, Joron’s
poetics hardly preclude more direct forms of political engagement and expression.
Never was this more apparent than in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, which sent
the entire poststructuralist/postmodernist theoretical apparatus crashing to the
ground. The attempts among avant-garde poets to respond to 9/11 were hamstrung by
the proposition propounded by language poetry that writing itself was a form of
political action. Into this void strode Joron with his pamphlet The Emergency of Poetry (2002), later reprinted
as “The Emergency” in both Fathom, a book
of poems, and The Cry at Zero, a volume
of selected prose. Joron’s essay was the most considered response within the innovative
poetry community to the combined impact of 9/11, the bombing of Afghanistan, and,
by implication, the Occupation of Iraq. [23] Amid the shock and demoralization of poetic responses
to circumstances that resist all poetry, “The Emergency” expressed exactly what
no poet wanted, and every poet needed, to hear: “ – only an inert and mechanical prose can accommodate these events. It
would be barbaric to write a poem about them, to use them for poetic purposes –.”
[24]This
insistence on lucidity – an insistence Breton also shares as early as the first
“Manifesto” [25]
– dispersed in one stroke the fog generated by language poetry’s claims to political
action through avant-garde writing. It would be dishonest to deny that “The Emergency”
has a certain poetic value, even if that’s
avowedly not Joron’s purpose. This poetic
value rather stems from Joron’s genuine solemnity, his lack of deliberate cleverness,
which lends the text an austere dignity. Contrast this with, say, Kenneth Goldsmith’s
conceptualist reproduction of CNN transcripts from 9/11 a dozen years after the
fact in Seven American Deaths and Disasters,
[26] which
he claimed on The Colbert Report captured
“the poetic quality of what was unfurling
linguistically at that moment.” Stephen Colbert, in his televised smackdown of Goldsmith,
perhaps put it best: “When I read this I feel like I’m like some sort of time traveling
aesthete who’s coming in to sample other people’s shock at tragedy.... I am tasting
it while I read it and it feels vampiric.” [27] Put Goldsmith’s text next to Joron’s, written
during the moment of crisis, and tell me which is an act of courage and which an
act of barbarism.
Joron and
Alexander are only the two most prominent examples of the lineage I invoked in “Selfie
at Delphi” and called here surrealism of the
word, a lineage that I’d say also includes Eric Baus as well as myself, Brian
Lucas, and Jeff Clark. I feel like there are many and many different types of poets
one could consider in terms of such a lineage, like John Olson, Nate Mackey, Kristen
Prevallet, or Noah Eli Gordon, or even poets more usually associated with language
poetry, like Norma Cole or Clark Coolidge. Certainly CA Conrad’s books of (soma)tic
poetry rituals are pure surrealism. I could name others, but I refuse to be in the
position of including or excluding poets from the label surrealism. For one thing, as I’ve tried to indicate here in relation
to Elaine Kahn and Frank Lima, surrealism is a thing that exists above and beyond
any self-conscious or deliberate espousal of it. And too, the emphasis on inclusion
and exclusion in the history of surrealism in the United States has been altogether
unproductive; one need only look at the exclusion of Will Alexander from the anthology
Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings
from Africa and the African Diaspora to realize the frauds perpetuated in surrealism’s
name. [28]
Far better
in this respect is the anthology What Will
Be: Almanac of the International Surrealist Movement published by the 50-year-old
Dutch surrealist group Brumes Blondes. For even as it purports to represent an international
movement – and there continue to be groups
putting themselves forward as local chapters of this movement – What Will Be begins with its own critique
in the form of “An Address to the Surrealists” by Alain Joubert. A postwar member
of Breton’s original Paris group, Joubert has an authority on the matter of surrealist
groups shared by only a handful of living persons. Yet Joubert’s address is hardly
calculated to appeal to the book’s primary audience, those who would avow themselves
surrealists in accordance with the group model:
The philosopher
Karl Popper wrote: “I call closed the magic or tribal society, and open the society
in which individuals are faced with personal decisions.” Throughout its existence,
until 1969, the original Surrealist group behaved, analogously, as a closed society.
The Surrealist group needed to assert its presence first, then build a fortress
from which it could launch pointed attacks against the outside world and the form
of society that dominated, both politically and spiritually. In the measure in which,
according to Breton in 1964, “we are beyond disapproval and approval,” Surrealism
has a duty to act now as an open society where those who serve it will be faced
with personal decisions.
Here, elsewhere, and now, it’s no longer
the time to prioritize the formation of groups. Let’s be clear: already constituted
groups (in Prague, for example), or particular strategic regroupings, in any country,
obviously shouldn’t be banned, but it is no longer a prerequisite for all activity.
However, with the surrealist diaspora based on a complicity discontinuous in time
and space, thanks to the rapprochement of individuals responsible for themselves,
free in their options as in their signature, one surely possesses the key that opens
the future: a potential new adventure, the International Surrealist Movement. [29]
On the one
hand, Joubert’s insistence on surrealism as a matter of individuals over groups
merely makes explicit what What Will Be
tacitly acknowledges in its inclusion of the work of such writers as Alexander or
Sotère Torregian, who have never belonged to any surrealist group. With the notable
exception of the work of Penelope Rosemont, co-founder and leader of the Chicago
Surrealists, virtually all of the great surrealist poetry produced in English since
the demise of the original Paris group in 1969 has been the work of individual practitioners.
The biggest problem with the surrealist groups of today is that the poetry can’t
even be called second-rate; it just plain sucks. This is at least partly due to
the determined insularity of this so-called surrealist poetry. There’s an attitude
that a surrealist poet needs to isolate his or her work from other poetry and restrict
itself purely to surrealist milieus. This was all well and good when surrealism
was an international movement with a centralized authority in Breton and the Paris
group, because Breton attracted many of the best poets of a generation. They could
afford and perhaps benefitted from this isolation. In today’s world, however, in
the absence of any prominent surrealist periodical and with poetry itself occupying
an ever-diminishing slice of cultural attention, such insularity is counterproductive.
This determined
insularity is only exacerbated by a willful ignorance about poetry. That is, Breton’s
determinedly anti-literary stance has
been taken to mean that surrealist poetry should be created in a vacuum, in complete
disregard of any knowledge of and experience in poetry itself. Michel Remy offers
a convenient summary of this position in the introductory matter to his superb recent
anthology of historical British surrealism, On
the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight:
It has to be said, first and foremost, that
any attempt to assess the “quality” or “value” of surrealist writing in comparison
to other writing – such as that by T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, or James Joyce – is
in total contradiction with the nature and goal of the surrealist proposition and
with its most fundamental principles. By definition, surrealist writing eschews
the traditional criteria (taste, beauty, structure, depth, symbolism...) by which
one judges a piece of writing, for the good reason that movement in itself does
not propound a style or a set of writing techniques, but is rather a body of commitments,
a state of mind, a unilateral declaration of independence. [30]
The assertion
that surrealism “eschews the traditional criteria...by which one judges a piece
of writing” is certainly a strawman argument in 2014, inasmuch as the proposed criteria
(“taste, beauty, structure, depth, symbolism”) haven’t been live considerations
in any poetry worth taking seriously since modernism. That battle has been fought
and won and no serious reader judges any contemporary poetry on these bases. The
fact of the matter is that you must “assess
the quality and value of surrealist writing in comparison to other writing,” for
the simple reason that surrealism must exceed the quality and value of other writing.
Despite one of surrealism’s earliest assertions, drawn from one of the movement’s
key progenitors Lautréamont, that
“Poetry should be made by all,” no “body of commitments” by itself is going to make
you into a poet. If you would be a poet of any sort, it behooves you to know as
much about poetry as you can. Obviously the poets who founded the surrealist movement,
poets like Breton, Desnos, and Éluard, had a profound knowledge of poetry. Even
a Rimbaldian prodigy like Lamantia spent a subsequent lifetime educating himself
in the art to which he dedicated his life. Indeed, in a short statement called “Between
the Gulfs,” Lamantia put his finger on the problem of surrealist groups when he
wrote “we
can all the more happily trace our inspirations from Lautréamont and Rimbaud to
Breton and Péret and Roussel to Magloire-Saint-Aude, exemplary signposts for further
transgressions, without literally re-tracing
in one’s own poetic praxis their inimitable movements.” [31] Unfortunately,
the poetry represented in the English-language
portions of What Will Be is almost uniformly
derivative and clichéd, filled with antique crap like “a monocled wolf” or “her
sun-splashed sex” – enough! Surrealism is elsewhere, and if you would call yourself
a surrealist poet, your work needs to be at least as interesting and original as
the work of those poets I’ve mentioned here.
NOTES
1.
“Theory of Retrieval” in Retrievals (Seattle:
Wave Books, 2014).
2.
“Selfie at Delphi” in What Surrealism Means
to Me (SF: Gas Meter Editions, 2014).
3.
This lecture, I should note, was first written and delivered 10 years ago, in 2014.
I’m pleased to report that, in some sense, the poetry world caught up with my opinions
expressed here the following year, though it took the open racism of conceptualist
chief Kenneth Goldsmith, and his weird obsession with/appropriation of police murder
victim Michael Brown’s penis, to bring everyone one around. (See, for example, www.phillymag.com/news/2015/03/19/penn-professor-criticized-for-michael-brown-poem/ for details.)
4.
“Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924) in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard
Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Michigan, 1972).
5.
For Trotsky, “permanent revolution” is the “uninterrupted” transition “from the
bourgeois stage into the socialist” on an international scale, which theoretically
“attains completion...in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet”
(Permanent Revolution [1930],
Calcutta: Gupta, Ramman, & Gupta, 1947).
6.
See “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” (silently co-authored by Trotsky)
(1938) in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings of André Breton, ed. Franklin Rosemont, London:
Pluto, 1978.
7.
See “The Political Position of Surrealism” in Manifestoes of Surrealism.
8.
Elaine Kahn, Women in Public (San Francisco: City Lights, 2015).
9. Women in Public.
10.
See “Frank Lima: The Poetry of Every Day Life and the Tradition of American Darkness”
(Editor’s Introduction) in Frank Lima, Inventory:
New & Selected Poems, ed. David Shapiro (West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press,
1997).
11.
“Frank Lima”.
12.
“Frank Lima”.
13.
These are the first three stanzas of “Sorrow Is Not Shy,” which appeared in Frank
Lima, Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems, Eds. Garrett
Caples and Julien Poirier (San Francisco: City Lights.
14.
“Frank Lima,”.
15.
The Tranquilized Tongue (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 2014).
16.
The Tranquilized Tongue.
17.
The Tranquilized Tongue.
18.
From “Solea of the Simooms” in Exobiology
as Goddess (San Jose, CA: Manifest Press, 2004).
19.
“Solea of the Simooms,”.
20.
From “Spine to Spin, Spoke to Speak” in Trance
Archive: New and Selected Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010).
21.
Trance Archive.
22.
“Second Manifesto of Surrealism” (1929) in Manifestoes
of Surrealism.
23.
“The Emergency” predates the Iraq Occupation as such, but the discussions in “Terror
Conduction” and “Divinations of the Vortex(t),” two subsequent essays from The
Cry at Zero, clearly extend its argument.
24. The Cry at Zero (Denver: Counterpath, 2007).
25.
Surrealism’s exploration of the irrational, in other words, doesn’t preclude its
use of the rational, as Breton pointed out in the first Manifesto: “If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces
capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against
them, there is every reason to seize them – first to seize them, then, if need be,
to submit them to the control of our reason” (Manifestoes).
26.
See Kenneth Goldsmith, Seven American Deaths
and Disasters (NY: powerHouse, 2013).
27.
Colbert’s quote and Goldsmith’s quote are both taken from the July 23, 2013 episode
of The Colbert Report.
27.
See Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley, eds., Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora
(Austin: University of Texas, 2009). Alexander is mentioned exactly once – a bibliographic
citation of his 1995 Pantograph Press book The
Stratospheric Canticles (p. 363) – as if to cover the editors’ asses, should
anyone object to the nonappearance of the work of perhaps the greatest African American
surrealist poet in history.
29.
See Alain Joubert, “All Cards on the Table: An Address to the Surrealists” in What Will Be: Almanac of the International Surrealist
Movement, Eds. Her des Vries and Laurens Vancrevel (Holland: Brumes Blondes,
2014). This is my own primitive translation from Joubert’s original French.
30.
Michel Remy, ed., On the Thirteenth Stroke
of Midnight: Surrealist Poetry in Britain (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2013).
31.
“Between the Gulfs” in Arsenal: Surrealist
Subversion, No. 2, 1973.
GARRETT CAPLES (United States, 1972). Poet and former music and arts journalist. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, he currently lives in San Francisco, California, after fifteen years in Oakland. He is the author of the Wave Books publication Proses: Incomparable Parables! Fabulous Fables! Cruel Tales! as well as the poetry collections Lovers of Today (Wave, 2021), Power Ballads (Wave, 2016), Complications (Meritage, 2007), and The Garrett Caples Reader (Black Square, 1999). Wave published his book of essays Retrievals in 2014. He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series, and has edited books by such poets as Will Alexander, mimi tempest, Joyce Mansour, Norma Cole, Frank Lima, Stephen Jonas, and Diane di Prima, among numerous others. He is also the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (California, 2013). He lives in San Francisco.
SUZANNE VAN DAMME (Bélgica, 1901-1986). Pintora posimpresionista belga que evolucionó hacia el surrealismo en la década de 1940. Se formó en las Academias de Bruselas y Gante y en el Studio L’Effort de Bruselas. Durante su estancia en Ostende, recibió la influencia de James Ensor. A principios de la década de 1930, Van Damme se mudó a París, donde conoció al pintor y poeta italiano Bruno Capacci, quien se convirtió en su marido. Ella pasó mucho tiempo en París, el sur de Francia, Londres y Florencia. En 1941 entró en contacto con los surrealistas y participó en la Exposición Internacional Surrealista de 1947 en París, organizada por Breton y Duchamp. Sus obras de los años 1940 hacen claramente referencia a Picasso, De Chirico, Seligmann y también a Toyen. Expuso en la Bienal de Venecia en 1935, 1954 y 1962 y en la Bienal de São Paulo en 1953. Cuando más tarde se mudó a Florencia, comenzó a crear obras más abstractas antes de desarrollar un lenguaje muy personal lleno de signos y símbolos. Sus obras se convirtieron entonces en conjuntos de ideogramas compuestos por minipinturas con elementos abstractos y figurativos. Es de lamentar, sin embargo, que su obra surrealista de pinturas haya sido comprada por coleccionistas y rara vez aparezca en colecciones públicas. Suzanne van Damme es la artista invitada en esta edición de Agulha Revista de Cultura.
Agulha Revista de Cultura
Número 257 | novembro de 2024
Artista convidada: Suzanne van Damme (Bélgica, 1901-1986)
Editores:
Floriano Martins | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
Elys Regina Zils | elysre@gmail.com
ARC Edições © 2024
∞ contatos
https://www.instagram.com/agulharevistadecultura/
http://arcagulharevistadecultura.blogspot.com/
FLORIANO MARTINS | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
ELYS REGINA ZILS | elysre@gmail.com
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