Fooling Around With Surrealism

There's not a lot of time left in the semester, so we had to race through the topic of surrealism today. A student made the apt point that a "manifesto of surrealism" seemed liked an instance of hypocrisy: we need a manual of rules for telling us how to break the rules?!

We also talked about the important role surrealism played in Modernist poetry; arguably the most famous Modernist poem, The Waste Land, is surrealistic.

Sometimes it's easier to start talking about surrealism in connection with painting, so I established a spectrum between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, with Dali and Pollock thrown in there somewhere for kicks. Almost everyone in the class loved paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, thought Dali was amusing and relatively accessible, but didn't quite know about Pollock. I described Warhol's film of the egg, and they didn't seem amused, although a couple of them noted that showing such a film would make people reconsider the practice and act of viewing films.

We then read a poem by Charles Simic, and one by Theodore Roethke. In the Simic poem, the key is that he begins by refusing to see the fork (in this case) in a routine way. The poem assumes we are seeing a fork for the first time, and that assumption is the trigger for surrealism. Roethke's poem takes a different approach. It is more like expressionism. It presents a kind of violent, confused emotional response to something ordinary--cuttings, as in cut flowers or cut willow branches. Surrealistic images spring from the emotional response, the inner turmoil. But again, the poem refuses to be merely descriptive.

We then talked about why anyone would want to write surrealistically. Answers: to represent reality more faithfully than realism (ironically); to break through the confines of conventions and predictable genres or modes (like the contemporary first-person, autobiographical narrative poem); to explore the unpredictable murk of the psyche.

I had also asked the class to bring relatively ordinary objects from home. These included a penny, a 2 dollar bill, a black candle, some kind of mysterious lamp shade, a stuffed animal that looked like a kitten and actually seemed to breath (this item freaked out everyone), a deer-skull, a watch, and dice.

We then began to write poems about the objects--our object own or someone else's. The poems needed to be "surrealistic" in some way--that is, not simply and conventionally descriptive. Robert Bly calls this kind of poetry "leaping poetry," and he argues that there's not enough of it in the American tradition. Of course, as I mentioned to the class, the trick is to make sure the reader has a prayer of making those leaps with you.

At any rate, I chose the dice (or die) someone had brought--red, with white dots. I couldn't resist. This is the draft I wrote:

Dice

Fold night several times until
it becomes a cube. The North Star
shines on one side, Orion's Belt
on another, and so on. Repeat the
process. You have two cubes.
Now let your fist swallow both
die. Hold your fist high, shake
it against the sky defiantly.
Make a wager with God.
Toss the cubes onto
a flat black velvet night. Look
at the way the constellated cubes
have come to rest, inert
and grave. Of course, you've lost.
The House always wins. God is
the House. The sky is God's casino.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Surrealism and Children

Our son is heading toward age 19; meanwhile, many of my colleagues have young children and in some cases have just started a family.

An older colleague once said to me, when our son was young, "You tend to be so focused on whatever age or 'phase' your child is in that you block out everything that came before as well as any thoughts about years to come." There's some truth to that. When I consider my younger colleagues and their children, I really have to work to reconstruct what it was like for my wife and me when our son was 1,2, 3, 6, 10, and so on.

One thing I do remember is how surrealism comes naturally to children. Their use of language is so playful and protean that they come up with extraordinary combinations of words and phrases. Their word-associations are ingenious. Also, everything is essentially a play-thing to them, so they tend to see the functional in artistic terms, just as Dali saw the functional clock as something that might melt as it hung from a limb in the sun. The older we get, the more likely--for a variety of reasons--we are to channel the surrealistic impulse away from us and become routine, rational, and perhaps plodding creatures.

I think I wrote the following poem when our son was four, five, or six years old--as I said, it's so hard to go back and recover moments precisely. I do recall that I was reading a paperback anthology of surrealistic European and American poetry at the time, as well as doing the maintenance-thing in the back yard of the house we lived in then. Henri Michaux was a French surrealist poet. The poem:

Miscellany: Michaux, Back Yard, A Son, Poetic Ambition, Oz

Henri Michaux says, “The ambition to write
a poem is enough to kill it.” The following words
have been reluctant to join an ambitious poem:
Epicondylitis. Actuarial. My son brings me half an acorn,
which looks like an owl's face. He turns over aluminum
chairs so they look even more like junk, or art.
“Do we need tools out here?!” he asks, with authority.
Not yet five, he can prophesy the joy
of chainsaws, V-8 engines, weed-eaters, snow-
blowers—stuff that makes us a snarling, fuel-drunk breed.
“The little I want, you never bring,” said Michaux
to his own life. His life listened—sure it did, uh-huh,
the way a stump pays attention to mockingbirds.
Digging in dirt, my son says to no one,
“I’ll get you and your little dog, too!”

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom