tearing my forehead apart for a dream: incorporating surrealism into your poetry
The Surrealist movement was spawned in the beginning of the twentieth century, its most notable centers in Paris and Brussels. The first Surrealists were influenced by Dadaism, a movement of anti-art that developed during the first World War in an attempt to rebel against a reality perceived as irredeemable in its violence and stifling in its conventionality. Poet Tristan Tzara would say that Dada began not as an art form, but as a disgust. Its contributors strived to do anything but reflect the times, creating instead their own universe of fantasy and illogic. This commitment to the absurd would become one of the major tenets of Surrealism, along with Freud’s theories on consciousness and the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Isidore Ducasse, and Alfred Jarry. In the first Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton writes that Surrealism is “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express…the actual functioning of thought…in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” It was believed that dreams and reality did not need to be at odds, and instead could be combined into an “absolute reality, a super-reality.”
In Braulio Arenas’s “The Obvious Sight,” which can be read as a kind of surrealist ars poetica, he writes, “A fisherman was mending his nets in your eyes / Such a beautiful afternoon I am tearing my forehead apart for a dream / I am shaking off all notion of slavery with the help of my hands / All notion of reality which now lays claim to dream.” In surrealist poetry, the subconscious is given free creative reign, resulting in works that appeal to something more visceral than organized thought, perhaps harkening back to the unbounded imagination of childhood. A lot of surrealist art does not have any concrete meaning, instead focusing on associations and feelings, so examining a collection often yields motifs but no coherent narrative arcs or symbols. This is delightfully illustrated by the index at the back of Zachary Schomburg’s The Man Suit, which includes items like “gorillas in people clothes,” “being eaten alive,” “moon, or moonlight, or moonlessness,” and “tunnels to warm places.” To read surrealist poetry is to be inside of someone’s psyche, to wade through creative impulses influenced by a life’s tangle of memories and perceptions.
The first Surrealist movement is generally agreed to have ended in the mid-twentieth century, but it has far from disappeared. Surrealism is still thriving all over the world, and its maxims can be found in the work of many contemporary poets, such as Matthea Harvey, Charles Simic, Jasper Bernes, James Tate, John Yau, Aimé Césaire, and John Ashbery.
There are multiple ways you can incorporate this into your own writing. Automatic writing, in which the author forfeits total control to the imagination, is one of the most popular methods of surrealist composition. Famously, André Breton’s Magnetic Fields was written almost entirely in this fashion. You simply record whatever comes to mind, immediately, before it can be beautified, rationalized, or otherwise altered. The key is to become utterly passive, withholding all self-censorship and indulging every creative impulse. The random phrases produced by this can be expanded on, strung together into a poem, or held onto for later to be mixed into other work.
If making the unfamiliar seem commonplace proves too difficult, you could always try making the commonplace seem unfamiliar. One historic surrealist game, a mockery of the tests where children are asked to spot what’s out of place in a picture, is looking at an ordinary photograph and trying to decide what’s “wrong” with it. This process can help you pick up on the oddness nested in reality, even if this oddness has been dulled by exposure. In Vik Shirley’s “I never intended to get into breeding,” the speaker considers the merits of breeding turkeys, then breeding turkeys and humans together, then finally just breeding humans, which, being a woman, she reckons she can do herself. In the Surreal-Absurd issue of Mercurius, poet Jeff Alessandrelli puts it like this: “In my latest poetry collections…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.”
Momentarily dipping into the surreal can be a useful way to enhance even non-surrealist pieces. Presenting the peculiar literally and sincerely is a good way to catch the reader off guard. An example is Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” in which she writes, “He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said…Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.” This blend of reality and impossibility, both told with the same tone, is what makes the poem so transportive.
We all dream. We all have a subconscious laying coiled beneath our logic. We are unreasonable creatures in an unreasonable world. Surrealism is universal, and everything that makes it so breathtaking is already in the most neglected corridors of your mind. What to do with it is yours to decide.
Jonah Ruddock is a Fall 2021 Editoral Intern.