What mysteries of life, the universe, nature, microscopic germs, and so on has your gaze penetrated? What secrets has the eye revealed?

         One day, then, tired of trudging along the steep track of earthly voyage and of staggering like a drunkard through life’s dark catacombs, I slowly raised my morose eyes (ringed with huge bluish circles) toward the concave firmament, and, though so young, dared penetrate the mysteries of heaven! Not finding what I sought I raised my dismayed gaze higher, still higher, until I caught a sight of a throne fashioned of human excrement and gold upon which, with idiotic pride, body swathed in a shroud made of unwashed hospital sheets, sat he who calls himself the Creator!¹

            In the mental domain no more than in the physical, it is quite clear that there can be no question of “spontaneous generation.” The creations of the Surrealist painters that seem to be most free can naturally come into being only through their return to “visual residues” stemming from perception of the outside world. . . . 
            Thus the whole technical effort of Surrealism, from its very beginning up to the present day, has consisted in multiplying the ways to penetrate the deepest layers of the mental. “I say that we must be seers, make ourselves seers”: for us it has only been a question of discovering the means to apply this watchword of Rimbaud’s.²

We are interested in how and what the eye reveals to those who are endowed with supersensible vision—to see what is within and without, to see through and beyond—to see and experience, with all of the senses, that which is hidden from common perception.


Daren Berton, Editor
Surreal Poetics

Notes:
[1] From the Second Canto. Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works, 3rd ed., translated by Alexis Lykiard, Cambridge: Exact Change, 2011, p.76.
[2] André Breton, “Surrealist Situation of the Object,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2010 Ann Arbor Paperbacks edition, 255-278, p.273.

Alejo Carpentier’s conception of lo real maravilloso proposes a surreal inherent quality of nature; the marvelous, the surreal, is an amplification of preexisting magic. As Carpentier asserts, “the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality…perceived with particular intensity…that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado limite].”[1]

​If we consider Carpentier's description of an inherent marvelous reality of nature, then each surrealist observes a metamorphosis of nature into an intensified version of itself: its estado limite. The surrealist’s gaze imparts a “particular intensity” with each perceptive, imagistic exploration of the always-already real maravilloso.

If we read Breton’s lines as a commentary on indifferent looking, then the opposite of indifference—an intense attention—is what would intensify color to its estado limite.

Elasticity of thought and experience require a space in which they can be pulled, torqued. Extremity, it seems, stretches the relation of those poetic associations. Ideally, to be marked by extremity is to experience all gradations between extremity’s multifaceted poles. Breton’s “Free Union,” for example, explores this kind of gradation; the poem’s associative and fluid image system insists on multiplicity.  Breton describes his wife’s physical nature:

The singular tongue is stretched through varying planes of visceral metaphor. (Well, we would call it metaphor. But surrealism, I’m convinced, is a metonymic process that reaches beyond metaphor’s forceful reliance on categorical separation). This stretching allows the tongue to become itself in its estado limite—in this space, it can exist simultaneously as multiple contrasting objects/images: a “stabbed wafer” AND an “incredible stone.”

perhaps we are looking within the already occurring. It is the project of our looking to INTERROGATE what lies there, and its limitations, in order to allow the elasticity of association to both EXALT the inherent magic of the pond and the lake and PULL each further into Nature’s marvelous open mouth.

     Frida Kahlo embodied Surrealism and the lived experience in her art, political views, eccentric attire, but mostly through her circumstances of constant pain caused by polio and a trolley accident. Experiencing illness and pain from an early age, combined with her rebellious nature, made her open to blend reality with the illogical, creating a fertile environment for the seeds of Surrealism. The persistent misery she experienced caused her to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, further altering her relationship with common reality, but it also lead her to painting. She's reputed as saying, “I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.” Kahlo wasn't attempting to shock with her actions or her artwork, but rather to express the truth of her life in which she touched the Marvelous—her idea of unadulterated beauty.

     Kahlo's painting, What the Water Gave Me, exemplifies surrealist art and shows connections between the tragedies in her life as well as her relationships and inability to have children. As one can imagine, being bedridden would lend to the mind’s drifting—from death to relationships and faraway places, as depicted in her paintings. Kahlo's brush with death thinned the veil of real and surreal as she “often saw Death dancing about her bed.”[1] As Death danced about her bed, she kept a papier mâché skeleton laced with fireworks on top of her canopy, bringing other-worldliness and her own mortality into close proximity.
     ​​Kahlo maintained that she wasn't a surrealist since she didn't paint dreams, but her work and her life explored the surreal elements of surprise and juxtaposition. She lived Surrealism: 

Her atypical life, with her constant pain and brushes with death, resolved the contradiction between dream and reality. So even though Kahlo didn't see herself as a surrealist, many view her as such since she had “a capacity to convoke a whole universe out of the bits and fragments of her own self and out of the persistent traditions of her own culture.”[3]
     ​In the following excerpt from Nicole Cooley's “Self Portrait: Frida Kahlo,” we see Kahlo playing a surrealist game while in the hospital. 

Kahlo's relationship to pain, Surrealism, and vision of herself as an artist unfold like a game of the Exquisite Corpse, expansive and unexpectedly. 

     ​Whether or not one believes her to have been a Surrealist . . . 

                                                            Frida Kahlo created art and gave us glimpses of the Marvelous.

La edición 03 de Surreal Poetics se obsesiona con el número tres, empezando por los tres temas en lugar de uno: el Surrealismo como la Crítica Social, el Surrealismo como la Experiencia Vivida, y el Surrealismo como la Naturaleza Maravillosa. Además, a medida que ampliamos nuestro alcance y trabajamos hasta una (re)unificación internacional del Surrealismo, cada tema de esta edición se incluye la poesía original en tres lenguas: el inglés, el español, y el portugués, con un editor invitado para cada una. Las introducciones siguientes para cada tema sirven como las miradas breves en la poesía que esperamos presentar en la tercera edición.
 
El Surrealismo como Crítica Social se agarra el crecimiento y el podercreativo simbolizado por el número tres. Trata de criticar los abismos sociales y entender la posibilidad de una tercera esfera de la sociedad por la síntesis de dos mitades distintos—el yin y el yang, tú y yo, etc.—al Nosotros singular, el todo entero.
 
            En su “Introducción” a La revolución al servicio de lo maravilloso”, Franklin Rosemont escribió, “todo lo que merece ser llamada la poesía está en peligro, casi hasta al punto de extinguirla, por un orden social violento y totalitario que amenaza la vida y aplasta el espíritu y que se interesa en la aumentación del beneficio, el poder, y el privilegio de una clase gobernante pequeño y parasitario.” [1]
 
            NOSOTROS QUEREMOS escuchar tu crítica social mediante la voz poética del Surrealismo.
 
El Surrealismo como Experiencia Vivida trata de entender cómo los surrealistas experimentan e interpretan la vida por medio de las características de todos humanos—el cuerpo, el alma, y el espíritu—y las tres etapas del ciclo humano—el nacimiento, la vida, y la muerte.
 
                Para la inspiración nos dirigimos al Comte de Lautréamont, quien personifica la experiencia vivida del surrealismo:
                Estar poseído por una idea fija: ¿conoces este tormento?
                No, la mente está demasiada relajada, los sentimientos demasiados fríos y dormidos, no esperas este tipo de tormento. Bueno, tengo dieciocho años, el espíritu ardiente, soy virgen de todos placeres excesivos, el cuerpo rebosante de la vida y todo vigor; una idea fija me domina: ser libre.
                […]
                Además: es el pulpo del novelista que me coge, me detiene, me agarra en sus abrazos espantosos. Nos convertimos en uno solo: me bebe, me inhala, asimila mi ser. Ya no soy yo sino lo soy. El hombre se transforma; todas sus facultades son absorbidas en el deseo y no es más de una pasión atendida por la voluntad.
                Ay, ¡por un pedacito de la libertad! [2]

                NOSOTROS QUEREMOS experimentar las experiencias vividas de los surrealistas actuales por sus palabras poéticas.
 
El Surrealismo como Naturaleza Maravillosa muestra lo estrambótico hermosoen la naturaleza tripartita del mundo—los cielos, la tierra, y las aguas.
 
            Al ver palpitar la ala de una mariposa, “tres veces salpicadadel polvo de todas las piedras preciosas,” André Breton reflexiona sobre la idea de la resurrección en que, “por medio de su metamorfosis oscura de estación a estación, la mariposa otra vez se pone sus colores elevados.” [3]
 
¿Cómo muestra la Naturaleza su estrambótico hermoso a las poetas de hoy? Hace poco que una especie de polilla recién descubierta fue nombrado por Donald Trump (Neopalpadonaldtruml) porque su “peinado” (las escamas pequeñas al frente)parece aquello de Donald Trump. Si Trump es un agente del “orden social que amenaza la vida” que Rosemontcondena en su introducción a La revolución al servicio de lo maravilloso, entonces ¿cómo interpretan la apariencia oportuna de la polilla los poetas de hoy?
 
            NOSOTROS QUEREMOS ver el mundo natural en todas sus manifestaciones maravillosas por la poesía de los surrealistas perspicaces.
 
            ¡NOSOTROS QUEREMOS EL SURREALISMO!

 
DarenBerton, Editor*
Surreal Poetics

*I would like to extend a special thanks to Sarah Griebel for helping Surreal Poetics with its call for poetry in Spanish.  ¡Viva el surrealismo! -DB

Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies…not only sadistic governors and greed bankers… not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche… and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society…all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action. – Aimé Césaire [1]

​    There is a banal nouveau hysteria and fear at work across the white screens of America: ‘Democracy is over!’; ‘They will start targeting undocumented residents!’; ‘This was a nation founded on the freedom for religious expression!’; ‘It is just so surreal to live in a country run by an angry citrus’; and ‘This is how Hitler rose to power!’ etc. The American Left is in the thrall of what can be termed an awakening—not from some dream into the Matrix-like wasteland Baudrillard and Zizek describe, but an awakening into a new fantasy/dream-layer: Resistant Leftism. As a counter to this imaginary which takes on the disposition of aggressive bourgeois cynicism, I return to a text of anger—I return to Aimé Césaire’s surreal Discourse on Colonialism.
​
    Associate of André Breton and founder of the negritude movement,[2] Césaire mobilized the language of his particularized oppressor (the French) to produce an occasion for unique resistance against the Colonial Real. This resistance is unique because it constitutes an opportunity to make the graying flesh (of what Césaire’s student Frantz Fanon would later describe as A Dying Colonialism) bleed out at the hands of the proletariat.[3] Césaire expands upon this idea in Discourse: