​Issue 03 of Surreal Poetics obsesses over the number three, beginning with three themes rather than one: Surrealism as Social Critique, Surrealism as Lived Experience, and Surrealism as Marvelous Nature.  Additionally, as we slowly broaden our scope and work toward an international (re)unification of Surrealism, each theme for this issue will include original poetry in three languages: English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with a guest editor for each language. The following introductions for each theme are meant only as brief insights into the poetry we are hoping to present in the third issue. 
 
Surrealism as Social Critique latches onto the creative power and growth symbolized by the number three.  It seeks to critique societal chasms and understand a possible third sphere of our society through the synthesis of distinct halves—yin and yang, you and I, etc.—into a singular WE or a whole ALL.
 
                In his “Introduction” to Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous, Franklin Rosemont wrote, “all that deserves the name poetry is endangered, almost to the brink of extinction, by a violent, totalitarian, spirit-crushing life-threatening social order that is concerned exclusively with increasing the profit, power, and privilege of a tiny, parasitical ruling class.”[1]
 
                WE WANT to hear your social critique through the poetic voice of Surrealism.
 
Surrealism as Lived Experience seeks to understand how surrealists experience and interpret life regarding the three attributes of every human—body, soul, and spirit—and the three stages of the human cycle—birth, life, and death.
 
                For inspiration we turn our attention to the Comte de Lautréamont who epitomizes the lived experience of surrealism:
               To be possessed by a fixed idea:  are you familiar with this torment?
                No, your mind is too easy, your senses too cold and sedate, you don’t’ suspect this sort of torture.  Well, I am eighteen, fervent of soul, virgin in every excessive pleasure, body overflowing with life and all vigour; a fixed idea dominates me: to be free.
                [ . . . ]
                Furthermore: it is the octopus of the novelist that seizes me, holds me, grasps me in its hideous embraces.  We become one: it drinks me, inhales me, assimilates my being.  I am no longer myself, I am it.  The man is transformed; all his faculties are absorbed in the desire, it’s no more than a passion served by the will.
                Oh, for just a bit of liberty![2]

                 WE WANT to experience the modern-day surrealists’ lived experiences through their poetic words.
 
Surrealism as Marvelous Nature reveals the beautifully bizarre within the tripartite nature of the world—heavens, earth, and waters. 
 
                In observing the flutter of a butterfly’s wing, “thrice smattered with the dust of all precious stones,” André Breton ponders the idea of resurrection in which, “through its obscure metamorphoses from season to season, the butterfly again puts on its exalted colors.”[3]
 
How does Nature reveal its beautifully bizarre to today’s poets?  Recently, a newly discovered species of moth was named after Donald Trump (Neopalpa donaldtruml) because its “hairdo” (the small scales on its frons) resembles that of Donald Trump.  If Trump is an agent of the “life-threatening social order” that Rosemont decries in his introduction to Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous, then how shall today’s poets interpret the moth’s timely appearance?
 
                WE WANT to see the natural world in all of its marvelous manifestations through the poetry of percipient surrealists.
 
                WE WANT SURREALISM!

Daren Berton, Editor
Surreal Poetics

In 1955, André Breton assured the world that Surrealism was still alive and relevant when he published his essay “Du surréalism en ces œuvres vives” (“On Surrealism in Its Living Works”) in Médium, communication surréaliste.* In the essay, he reminds us of the primacy of language, man’s love of woman, and the image within Surrealism—giving works vitality and life.  Of these three topics, I wish to focus on language and the image as two primary concerns for Issue 02 of Surreal Poetics. 
 
Language 
            Surrealism has always concerned itself with liberating the mind through language: “nothing less than the rediscovery of the secret of a language whose elements would then cease to float like jetsam on the surface of the dead sea” (297).  Surrealism revolts against mainstream writing in an attempt to liberate words and reinvigorate language.  In the beginning, this was achieved through “pure psychic automatism” (PPA) in order to locate “the ‘prime matter’ (in the alchemical sense) of language” (299).  PPA ceased to be practiced once it achieved its objective so as to not become new “floating jetsam.”  Today’s poets should only employ the practice of pure psychic automatism as modeled by Surrealism’s originators.  Once the poet knows where to locate the “prime matter” he or she should abandon automatism lest it become over-used and pedestrian.  Thus, PPA is a training tool for the neophyte surrealist and will eventually be abandoned since the poet will have located the emancipatory power of the word within the self and will be able to create freely outside of the self.
            Therefore, Surreal Poetics seeks to highlight poetry that reinvigorates language, reveals internal discoveries, and pushes linguistic boundaries. 
 
Image
            The primacy of the image within Surrealism enabled surrealists to obtain “incandescent flashes” as a result of joining two elements so unrelated from each other that “reason would fail to connect them,” requiring a suspension of critical reasoning in order for the two elements to come together and spark a poetic image (302).  As the poet allows his or her thinking to open up to unfamiliar possibilities through the “incandescent flashes,” brought about through the poetic image—with its primary vehicle as the metaphor, an “extraordinary network of sparks [will lead] the mind to have a less opaque image of the world and itself” (302).  Therein lies the most poetic freedom: the world will be less opaque to those whose minds can relax and illuminate that which was previously hidden amongst the mundane.
            Therefore, Surreal Poetics seeks to highlight poetry that uncovers the marvelous, the convulsive . . . poetry containing images that question and startle, images that clash and sparkle, images that reveal the hidden ever-present . . . images that always keep in mind Breton’s words that “beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all” (Nadja 160).
 
Poetic Intuition
            In the final paragraph of “On Surrealism in Its Living Works,” Breton tells us that Surrealism equips us with the means to understand our place in nature—our existence (within the natural configuration) is neither superior nor inferior to that which surrounds us; Surrealism unleashes that means: “poetic intuition.”  Only this poetic intuition “can put us back on the road of Gnosis as knowledge of suprasensible Reality, ‘invisibly visible in an eternal mystery’” (304).  Surreal Poetics understands that all existence—physical, spiritual, temporal, spatial, and so on—is an eternal mystery and aims to provide a space for poets to unleash their “poetic intuition” and render the invisible visible through language and the image. 
 
Surreally Yours,
Daren Berton, Editor
Surreal Poetics
 
*(Breton signed the essay in May of 1953 [here is a digital archive of Breton’s original manuscript with his notations], but it was not published until almost two years later when it appeared in Médium, communication surréaliste, n°4, janvier 1955, 2-4.  I quote the English translation in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor Paperbacks edition, 2010, 295-304.)