Surrealism in Gulf Coast

This five-way conversation recently appeared over at Gulf Coast between Heather Christle, Hannah Gamble, Matthew Rohrer, Zachary Schomburg, and Matthew Zapruder. We're reposting because we love five-ways, and surrealism. Here's the intro below, but you'll have to go to their site to get the full text.

"Good Warm Sad Blood Spilling Out in the Forest"

a conversation with Heather Christle, Hannah Gamble, Matthew Rohrer, Zachary Schomburg, and Matthew Zapruder

The following conversation took place over email in the fall of 2009, although, as Matthew Rohrer articulated in a preliminary exchange, we would rather have been together in a hotel conference room eating Chinese takeout. Gulf Coast organized this conversation because it seemed, to us, that a new generation of surrealist- and absurdist-influenced poetry had emerged in the U.S., written by poets ranging from their mid-twenties to mid-forties and rooted in small presses like Wave Books, Black Ocean, and Octopus Books. But what does “surrealism” even mean, in American poetry today? We decided to ask some of the editors and authors associated with these small presses what they thought about the “surrealist” label and their relationship to it.

Comments

[Property Press]

“What does ‘surrealism’ even mean, in American poetry today?” Good question, and pretty good conversation too, though it certainly includes a lot of reverence for Breton and a lot of appeals to the lineage of French Surrealism. A more thorough investigation of the question above might begin by posing another question: “What did ‘surrealism’ even mean in Europe in the twentieth century?” It is a question whose answer can by no means avoid confronting either social relations at the time of Surrealism’s emergence or the virulent (and historically determined) controversies that followed among Surrealists themselves.

One essay that attempts to do that precisely that is the Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s “Autopsia del superrealismo.” If anyone is interested, a new translation of the essay can be found in the forthcoming pamphlet, here. Free.

A launch party for the pamphlet will be held in Boston this summer. Stay tuned.

[Property Press]

In the second paragraph, the above should read “precisely that” not “that precisely that.”

More importantly, here is the opening of Vallejo’s 1930 essay for those who would like a taste. Say hello for a free copy:

“The capitalist intelligentsia offers, among other symptoms of its agony, the depravity of the cenacle. It is curious to observe how the most recent and acute crises of economic imperialism—the war, the industrial rationalization, the misery of the masses, the crashes of financers and firms, the development of the workers’ revolution, the colonial insurrections, etc.— synchronically correspond to a furious multiplication of literary schools, as improvised as ephemeral. Circa 1914, expressionism was born (Dvorak, Fretzer). Circa 1915, cubism was born (Apollinaire, Reverdy). In 1917, dadaism was born (Tzara, Picabia). In 1924, surrealism (Breton, Ribemont-Dessaignes). Not counting the already existing schools: symbolism, futurism, neosymbolism, uanimism, etc. Finally, despite the surrealist pronouncements, almost monthly a new school bursts forth…”