​Issue 04 of Surreal Poetics marks the end of a long hiatus. Today, 11 June 2020, marks the four year anniversary of the first issue of Surreal Poetics. That first issue started out with a simple vision: to provide a space for people to achieve surreal freedom through poetry. The reader should not equate our use of the word surreal with its pedestrian use to mean weird or strange. Surreal Poetics is for the surrealist and founded on the tenets of Surrealism.

​The vision for what Surreal Poetics could be evolved over the course of the second and third issues to include art and poems in multiple languages. We are grateful to all of the poets and artists whose contributions to Surreal Poetics and dedication to the surrealist cause have made our endeavor successful. The fourth issue will return to a simpler format that focuses solely on the poem and seeks to observe the world through the surrealist’s penetrating gaze.

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.

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.)