For all its supposed authenticity, poetry is unreal, or surreal. Who talks like this? Who thinks this way? In a way, I guess, the authenticity of the poem is its distance from the real and the mundane and the necessary. Ah! But Billy Collins! Mary Oliver! Ginsberg! Frost! Plath! Bishop! Surreal, surreal, surreal, surreal, surreal, and surreal. Because they express themselves poetically, in rhythm and figure. Maybe I'm making too much of the obvious, but that is poetry, heightened language, feeling, thought. Above the real. Meta-speak.
So when it comes time to write a surreal poem, to whom do we turn? Cocteau. Baudelaire. Rimbaud. Maybe Cassidy or Kerouac. Charles Simic. James Tate. The usual suspects. Yet that image of pressure the apple picker feels in the soles of his feet in the Frost poem is beyond the real, is it not?
The surreal, the hermetic, the gnomic, the fabulous and the absurd. There is a long tradition of poetry that flies in the face of common sense, the ordinary, the linear kind of logic we get in, say, . . . I almost wrote Milton. But if Paradise Lost isn’t of the absurd, then . . .
Generally we associate this kind of poetry with children’s tales. Alice in Wonderland. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But The Iliad is a form of the fabulous and the surreal and absurd. So is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the realm of lyric poetry, occasional poetry, even the so-called "public" poetry (the stuff they read at presidential inaugurations), there is considerable room for the fabulous: Marlowe? John Clare, Jorge Luis Borges, Laurie Anderson? Anne Carson? Take a look at Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" and tell me those fish swimming in a meadow are not the Surreal Image of the Era!
Not to be confused with the nonsensical, or “nonsense” poetry. The absurd, the surreal, the fabulous, make perfect sense, wonderful sense, but only within their own constructs of sense and logic. In these poems, a potato has eyes and a man can walk a bee on a leash and a whale can conceive of the world as nothing more than the tank of seawater in which it swims. A barber can unscrew his hand to wash it in a rice-paper bowl.
Such poems, when you read them, make complete grammatical and story-telling sense. They have plots and characters and even lessons to teach. But they do so in NOT NORMAL ways . . . and this surprises us. Sometimes it can unsettle us. Via arresting image, anachronism, leap of language, a mental violence. The surreal opens us up to the absurd landscapes in which we live but to which we have become blindly accustomed. A shopping mall? A courtroom? A suburb? A hardcover book? A telephone conversation? A sacrament? Not to mention your nightly dreamscape.
The poetry of the surreal, the absurd, helps us to access the old, radical, charmed worlds deep inside of us. Here are some poems that fit the model, more or less, either in total in one or two arresting images/juxtapositions. Which is our project for the next Wednesdays@One . . . to get to that strange place by means of an arresting image or two, a juxtaposition of ordinaries into a new extraordinary. Following are some examples to get you started.
Examples
So when it comes time to write a surreal poem, to whom do we turn? Cocteau. Baudelaire. Rimbaud. Maybe Cassidy or Kerouac. Charles Simic. James Tate. The usual suspects. Yet that image of pressure the apple picker feels in the soles of his feet in the Frost poem is beyond the real, is it not?
The surreal, the hermetic, the gnomic, the fabulous and the absurd. There is a long tradition of poetry that flies in the face of common sense, the ordinary, the linear kind of logic we get in, say, . . . I almost wrote Milton. But if Paradise Lost isn’t of the absurd, then . . .
Generally we associate this kind of poetry with children’s tales. Alice in Wonderland. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But The Iliad is a form of the fabulous and the surreal and absurd. So is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the realm of lyric poetry, occasional poetry, even the so-called "public" poetry (the stuff they read at presidential inaugurations), there is considerable room for the fabulous: Marlowe? John Clare, Jorge Luis Borges, Laurie Anderson? Anne Carson? Take a look at Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" and tell me those fish swimming in a meadow are not the Surreal Image of the Era!
Not to be confused with the nonsensical, or “nonsense” poetry. The absurd, the surreal, the fabulous, make perfect sense, wonderful sense, but only within their own constructs of sense and logic. In these poems, a potato has eyes and a man can walk a bee on a leash and a whale can conceive of the world as nothing more than the tank of seawater in which it swims. A barber can unscrew his hand to wash it in a rice-paper bowl.
Such poems, when you read them, make complete grammatical and story-telling sense. They have plots and characters and even lessons to teach. But they do so in NOT NORMAL ways . . . and this surprises us. Sometimes it can unsettle us. Via arresting image, anachronism, leap of language, a mental violence. The surreal opens us up to the absurd landscapes in which we live but to which we have become blindly accustomed. A shopping mall? A courtroom? A suburb? A hardcover book? A telephone conversation? A sacrament? Not to mention your nightly dreamscape.
The poetry of the surreal, the absurd, helps us to access the old, radical, charmed worlds deep inside of us. Here are some poems that fit the model, more or less, either in total in one or two arresting images/juxtapositions. Which is our project for the next Wednesdays@One . . . to get to that strange place by means of an arresting image or two, a juxtaposition of ordinaries into a new extraordinary. Following are some examples to get you started.
Examples
(from) The
Field of Rooms and Halls
─Richard Siken (2015)
1
A man
found a door and hung it on the wall.
I think he
thought in rectangles, each day’s bright panel pushed against the next, a
calendar of light. He would paint them, all these days, and hang them out of
order: an unreliable hotel where no one ever knew which rooms were his, which
rooms he had actually been inside of. There were gaps, of course, and sometimes
overlaps: days too small to fill their slots, days too large for the day to
hold them. And days, no matter what their size, that leaked into the next. A
leaky day is a dangerous thing. January and her thirty-two rooms.
2
I put my
sadness in a box. The box went soft and wet and weak at the bottom. I called it
Thursday. Today is Sunday. The town is empty.
I stood in
the road looking forward and back, to see if it would change something. After
awhile, I went back inside and tripped over the box.
Driving Around
─Charles Simic (2015)
And then there is our Main Street
That looks like
An abandoned movie set
Whose director
Ran out of money and ideas,
Firing at a moment’s notice
His entire filming crew,
And the pretty young actress
Dressed for the part
Standing with a pinched smile
In the dusty window
Of Miss Emma’s bridal shop.
Used Clothing Store
─Charles Simic (2005)
A large stock of past lives
To rummage through
For the one that fits you
Cleaned and newly pressed,
Yet frayed at the collar.
A dummy dressed in black
Is at the door to serve you.
His eyes won’t let you go.
His mustache looks drawn
With a tip of a dead cigar.
Towers of pants are tilting,
As you turn to flee,
Dean men’s hats are rolling
On the floor, hurrying
To escort you out the door.
Photo Veritable
─David Shapiro (1977)
Clouds cover the earth
Passengers leave but the
clouds remain. The passengers
would like to nestle and ride
in the cancerous breasts
of the sky. But the clouds
are willful and shout as
they fly: “Dirigent, dirigent
dirigent and wealthy.” You will live
like a god and like it, too.
(from) Mozart
in Prague: Thirteen Rondels
─Jaroslav Seifert (1985)
1.
I’d like to play a singing flute,
while these poems are rimed in place!
She wants nothing but a dance,
for her the words are brutal,
and the cold wind rants at the hooded
windows, the dark season’s forgotten face.
I’d like to play a singing flute,
while these poems are rimed in place!
I look for a grave. Fog covers the route.
Gates close behind me, a hand of grace.
No, not yet! Here I stay, my boots
halt as the dead whisper, white and chaste.
I’d like to play a singing flute!
My Felisberto
─James Tate (1997)
My felisberto is handsomer that your mergotroid,
although, admittedly, your mergotroid may be the wiser of the two.
Whereas your mergotroid never winces or quails,
My felisberto is a titan of inconsistencies.
For a night of wit and danger and temptation
my felisberto would be the obvious choice.
However, at dawn or dusk when serenity is desired
your mergotroid cannot be ignored.
Merely to sit near it in the garden
and watch the fabrications of the world swirl by,
the deep-sea’s bathymetry wash your eyes,
not to mention the little fawns of the forest
and their flip-flopping gymnastics, ah, for this
and so much more your mergotroid is infinitely perferable.
But there is a place for darkness and obscurity
without which life can sometimes seem too much,
too frivolous and too profound simultaneously,
and that is when my felisberto is needed,
is longed for and loved, and then the sun can rise again.
The bee and the hummingbird drink of the world,
and your mergotroid elaborates the silent concert
that is always and always about to begin.
A Button
─Zbigniew Herbert (1999)
The
best fairy tales of all are about us, how once we were small. I like most the
one about how I swallowed an ivory button. My mother was crying.
From the End
─Zbigniew Herbert (1999)
And
then they set a huge table, and a magnificent wedding feast took place. That
day the princess was even more beautiful than usual. Music played. Girls as
lovely as moons danced below.
Well,
fine, but what happened before? Oh, let’s not even think about it. A black
fortune-teller beats against the windows like a moth. Forty thieves lost their
long knives and beards as they were fleeing, and the dragon—changed into a
beetle—peacefully sleeps on an almond leaf.
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