ISSUE 03 - SURREALISM as SOCIAL CRITIQUE, LIVED EXPERIENCE,
& MARVELOUS NATURE
~
DAREN BERTON, EDITOR
Surreal Poetics exists as a space for people to achieve surreal freedom through poetry. We reclaim the word surreal, releasing it from its quotidian confines by means of a simultaneously obscure and illuminating-illuminated poetics produced by those capable of seeing—perceiving—differently. Visionary poets experience life in unusual ways, sense (see, feel, hear, intuit, and so on) the unnoticed marvelous in nature (to which the modern-day person has become desensitized), and provide critical insights into our social interactions and structures. Thus, Surrealism’s three themes in Issue 03: Social Critique, Lived Experience, Marvelous Nature.
The present issue is guided by the number three: three themes, three poems per theme, and three languages. An online chance encounter resulted in a fruitful collaboration with our guest editor Alfonso Peña, who happens to work with surrealist poets in Spanish and Portuguese. He has coordinated a wonderful selection of poems from throughout the American continents. And BRAVO to the translators who offered their talents au service du surréalisme to make the Spanish and Portuguese-language poems accessible to the English-speaking world, although perhaps only slightly accessible, for what reader of surrealist poetry can say with complete confidence that he or she understands every image and metaphor? Even Breton himself declares that the greatest virtue of Surrealist images “is the one that is arbitrary to the highest degree, the one that takes the longest time to translate into practical language.”[1] Keeping this in mind, the reader should approach the English translation of each poem as an interpretation.
Issue 03 also features collage art by Irene Våtvik so as to enhance the poetic experience through visual stimulation.
Dear reader, as you experience each poem, allow the visual and the verbal to work together to produce unexpected, confusing, and even uncomfortable thoughts. Allow the collage to reveal hidden meaning within the poem. Allow the poem to give you insight, or rather . . . new sight!
New sight? Yes!
Consider each poem as a lens through which your vision becomes adjusted to a new way of seeing the world around you.
The present issue is guided by the number three: three themes, three poems per theme, and three languages. An online chance encounter resulted in a fruitful collaboration with our guest editor Alfonso Peña, who happens to work with surrealist poets in Spanish and Portuguese. He has coordinated a wonderful selection of poems from throughout the American continents. And BRAVO to the translators who offered their talents au service du surréalisme to make the Spanish and Portuguese-language poems accessible to the English-speaking world, although perhaps only slightly accessible, for what reader of surrealist poetry can say with complete confidence that he or she understands every image and metaphor? Even Breton himself declares that the greatest virtue of Surrealist images “is the one that is arbitrary to the highest degree, the one that takes the longest time to translate into practical language.”[1] Keeping this in mind, the reader should approach the English translation of each poem as an interpretation.
Issue 03 also features collage art by Irene Våtvik so as to enhance the poetic experience through visual stimulation.
Dear reader, as you experience each poem, allow the visual and the verbal to work together to produce unexpected, confusing, and even uncomfortable thoughts. Allow the collage to reveal hidden meaning within the poem. Allow the poem to give you insight, or rather . . . new sight!
New sight? Yes!
Consider each poem as a lens through which your vision becomes adjusted to a new way of seeing the world around you.
[1] André Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism," Manifestoes of Surrealism, Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, U of Michigan P, 2010, p. 38.
