Category: ABSURDIST LITERATURE
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Surreal-Absurd Sampler Aaron Kent
This bi-weekly feature surreal-absurd at Mercurius is chalk-full of freshness. The latest, the poetry of Aaron Kent, features the belly of a dinosaur, avatar’s eating themselves from the inside, making the milk rounds, oceans of flame and the universe as a diamond. It is activism. The serious colliding with the absurd. Check out the poems…
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Jeff Hilson Surreal-Absurd
“Is there anything more beautifully absurd than Kenneth Koch’s tiny play about the island of Madagascar breaking away from the African continent, or Hannah Weiner’s code of signals Romeo and Juliet? I’m currently writing a series of very short plays about fungi, as well as making a record of all the dreams I’ve been having…
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William Erikson Surreal-Absurd
Terrific surreal-absurd feature at Mercurius this week. It’s William Erikson. There are many doozies. Here is part of one called BBC: “A young man lifts his hands to the sun and the sun becomes / honey. He opens his mouth to the moon and the moon becomes / breath mints.” Read more of William Erikson’s…
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Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
“Living is a language of hunger I want to make love to a man No not a man exactly but I want to Make love to something extremely hairy . . .” This week’s surreal absurd sample of Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi will tingle yr pineal. Head on over here to read more: tingletingle
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Natalie Shaw Surreal-Absurd Sampler
They are magical boxes, or very intricate paper pop-ups, or entire carved worlds waiting to be tipped out of a hollowed-out bean. Each one has its own logic and necessariness. – Natalie Shaw This week’s surreal-absurd at Mercurius magazine is Natalie Shaw. Check out her wild poems over here
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Lesle Lewis Surreal-Absurd
I think of it as a spectrum and not a binary division of real from surreal or sense from nonsense. I think of it as inclusive, the surreal being part of the real, the real as part of the surreal, the sensical in nonsense and the nonsense in sense, a new sense.
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NAKED FREEDOM
Here is a low key reading of my prose poem “Sandals” in issue Sprung Formal 18. Perhaps my last publication as Slease.
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SPRUNG FORMAL 18
Happy as Larry to have prose poems in new issue of Sprung Formal from the Kansas City Art Institute. Beautiful art object too. Maybe my last publication as Slease. Stinky thinker alerts in South Korea. Fiestas in Sitges. I am no longer wearing socks with my sandals.
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OPENING TO DREAMLIFE OF HONEY
After devouring everything Édouard Levé, Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector, Lydia Davis, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, David Markson, & Jon Fosse, I found a way to move forward with my second autoficiton novel, The Dreamlife of Honey. There are still some touches, forever touches, or maybe tweaks, to move the manuscript into book form, plus, of…
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Hasso Krull
Reading Six Estonia Poets from the New Voices from Europe & Beyond series from Arc Publications. Terrific project, & needed. Hasso Krull is becoming a fav poet, & others in there interesting too. Here is one of Krull’s poems. More can be found over here too at Poetry International.
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Grzegorz Wróblewski – Surreal-Absurd Prose poems – Translated by Peter Burzinsky
Some surreal-absurd prose poems of Grzegorz Wróblewski over at Tupelo Quarterly, translated by Peter Burzinsky.
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Mark Waldron Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The dirty old unconscious is always toiling away down there, cooking up something peculiar and true; day in, day out; night in, night out; which might be turned into a poem.”—Mark Waldron 2022 kicks off with Mark Waldron. A surreal-absurd sampler. You can read them here at Mercurius.
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Luke Kennard
“I think the poems I really love are the ones where the thought is happening (or being reanimated) in front of you.”— Luke Kennard
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Jenna Clake
“My favourite Absurdist poetry is the kind that pulls you into a dreamlike situation, and makes you question what is real, what isn’t, and whether that even matters.”—Jenna Clake This week’s surreal-absurd sampler is a doozy over at Mercurius
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Judson Hamilton
“These poems are from a manuscript I’m working on called The Vogue for Flatness, so we’re still learning about one another. Poems for me are a way to filter the world, to make sense of it, to live in it. Perhaps it’s having been raised in suburbia or a childhood steeped in comics and cable…
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Patricia Farrell
“touching my dancing hands like a robot back walking that I don’t feel too sorry for but I know the cold that’s hitting me was hitting my face to the claws ”
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James Knight
This surreal absurd sampler is a nice combo. Some psycho-sexual Bird King poems from James Knight and art from Alex Stevens. Check em out over here at Mercurius.
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Glen Armstrong
“I’ve been writing requiems for people I admire lately, some of them fictional, some of them still alive. These folks may have ended up on gum wrappers or Mr. Cobain’s t-shirt or Mr. Zapruder’s movie. They usually share a unique talent that still can’t compensate for a unique and profound sadness. These are a few…
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Mark Russell
“They mine the ways in which we deceive and are deceived; how our pursuit of meaning and intimacy so persistently misfires; how unremitting is the absurdity, and yet how heartily we laugh into it.”
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Charles J. March III
” . . . blame ‘the Other,’ who claims to be an ironic, apocalyptic iconoclast, who had nothing but a deadpan beside him and marijuana garden beneath to piss in whilst swinging from the gallows and birthing this into existence.” – Charles J March III Check out this terrific surreal-absurd sampler of erasure poems from…
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Brian Clifton
“There was a game I used to play as a child. My friends and I would turn off the lights of a room and stare at each other’s faces. Because we could only see vague outlines, our imaginations would fill in the details, would distort the faces we knew until they were strange and stranger.”…
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Lorelei Bacht
“I grew up on French surrealisme (my mother would read us Paul Eluard’s poetry at bedtime) and I visit this open-ended poetic space whenever I am struggling to make sense of things and/or to write anything sensical. Sometimes, I manage to catch a few sublime fish. Other times, I can only perceive a faint glimmer. ”…
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David Greenslade
“During lockdown I explored the idea of immobility — especially the sessile animal known as the sponge. I began to think of myself as a sessile being.”
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Jeff Alessandrelli
“I attempted to investigate what doesn’t fit and why that unfitting is often more important than that that fits. The songs on the record that I like best are the ones that momentarily skip before righting themselves. But you remember the skip later.” — Jeff Alessandrelli
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Hugh Behm-Steinberg
“One of the things that most frustrated me about living in B_________ was its absence of mammals. Except for people, their cats and dogs, and the bats that flitted around at sunset, I never saw a single squirrel, mouse, or wolf, anywhere. So I ordered five pairs of red breeding squirrels on Amazon using my…
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Matthew Haigh
This week’s surreal-absurd sampler is Matthew Haigh. Poems that use the cut up technique and “centre around cult television shows with a warm, gay-icon slant (The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote respectively). Utilising the internet movie database (IMDB).”
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Chrissy Williams
Here is another installment of the surreal-absurd feature at Mercurius Magazine. The poet Chrissy Williams. From her just released book Low (Bloodaxe).
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Vik Shirley
Enjoying curating the surreal-absurd feature in Mercurius magazine. So much interesting work out there. Here is a selection of poems from Vik Shirley. From her chapbook Corpses and her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door. The surreal is alive and well! Check em out over here
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Zachary Schomburg
I am editing a surreal-absurdist feature for Mercurius magazine. Every other Monday, I will feature an absurdist/surrealist writer to tickle your fancies. First up, we have Zachary Schomburg. A selection of prose poems from his book Fjords vol.2, forthcoming from Black Ocean in May 2021. Read the selection over here.
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Gravity Bubbles
In the heat of the first wave of Lockdown, I participated in an collaboration with the poets Calliope Michail and Chris Gutkind. We decided to call it Gravity Bubbles to emphasize both the gravity of the situation (we were all feeling the heaviness of lockdown in the UK and Spain), and the power of art…
Never Mind the Beasts 