Michael Chang Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The surreal and the absurd are absolutely necessary. […] My work reflects my own thoughts and impressions about what makes people tick. Turns out I find comfort in the “not knowing”.”
Spring 2024 Book Launch!
We’re proud to present the next round of Mercurius books!
Mercurius’s Future World(s) is an anthology of essays that look beyond nihilistic neoliberalism.
Mercurius No. 2: Local Nature Devas is a selection of texts and images from the Poetry of Life, Society, Transitions, and Images sections of the website.
No unifying structure
As with the execution of an etching (drawing with a fine needle into a blackened wax ground), or with a poem (spontaneous first word/s, no need to understand), I begin my drawings on an impulse, not knowing or wanting to know the outcome, working spontaneously, attentive to detail - a process I have learnt to trust.
Sylee Gore Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Inhale an image, exhale a word. Melt a book to paint a mirror. Buy nothing you can borrow. Refill a song. Place a window somewhere evident. Let muscle overcome memory. Is image a language never needing translation?”
Aaron Kent Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Through surrealism, I write connected to activism, connected to absurdity, and connected to art.”
Yi Won Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A central feature of Yi Won’s work is how she sees the world through images rather than meaning. "This feature makes me want to make my poetic language imagery newer and stranger," Yi Won says…"The irony of the closest thing being the most unfamiliar seems to provide an unfamiliar and familiar image at the same time.”
Jeff Hilson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My poems court the absurd in that they’re incongruous, at times silly, and frequently out of tune (from the Latin absurdus) – think The Residents’ Commercial Album, Heinrich Ignatz Franz von Biber’s scordatura tuning for the Rosary Sonatas, as well as The Shaggs…”
Maria Sledmere Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My poetry is made from dream paste, shimmer artifice of momentary disturbance. I like that surrealism is about connection and rupture, copying, aporia. I always felt my soul was pretty alien.”
Chris Gutkind Surreal-Absurd
I feel my work is utterly real, in itself and what it refers to in myself or in the world outside myself, but to make it real I may use the unreal or strange or impossible, an old working truth of poetry and all art, that's always been one of its main practices, and a very effective one when done well, making us see and feel the world anew and more deeply than before, adding to the thickness and complexity of the real, and as many have said: art lies to tell the truth
Anne-Laure Coxam Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Love is surreal, surreal is love” - to divert John Lennon’s line (big words! what’s love, what’s surreal?). These poems (what’s a poem?) emerged from an accident, the accident of opening a territory and the accident of venturing into this new intimate territory where two bodies touching and two subconscious minds clinking against each other is full of dangers and an endless surprise.
Kristin Bock Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A successful surreal poem makes the magic happen inside the reader. Strangeness or dream logic can sneak past our rational sensors and scream through us like lightning.”
II
An excerpt from Michael Salu's work in progress novel “II”
william erickson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Surreal-Absurd
“I like to say the same things over and over—but spelled different. Have you noticed?” Sharing the work & surreal-absurd outlook of PNW poet william erickson.
As-if or As-Is: A Cretan Encounter
On a quest for the skull we enter Aghios Titos, sit on a back bench in the main chamber and survey the interior. In the center a wagon-wheel chandelier of filigreed olive wood, inset with foot-high stained-glass portraits of saints, topped by as-yet unlit (electric) candles.
Saw My Soul on the Side of the Road
I feel the constant business of life chip away at any wonder and curiosity in a concept like the soul. Connecting to spiritual ideas feels close to impossible in the scheduled days. The desire to progress in a world that doesn’t value something like the soul ends up meaning less priority to spirituality.
Unspeakable: Asemic mail collaboration
An asemic mail collaboration
Bête Noire
A selection of visual poems
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Improvisation, chance, surprise, wild leaps, dream-logic, these are the overriding principles. Resistance to where the brain wants to default. Which is to wake up and start talking like a college-admissions essay. Yuck, am I right?”
Sin Yong-Mok Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Surreal-Absurd
Ghosts appear in many plays. A long time ago the actor who played the Ghost had to get rid of his body. Only his voice was left. It must have been before someone wearing a white sheet took on the role of the Ghost. The person playing the Ghost had to be a ghost, just as he who plays Macbeth must be Macbeth. The actor killed himself to play the Ghost. He did not realize that once his body was gone, he would lose his voice. He shouted, but no lines were left on stage. He moved, but no action remained on stage. But the audience was listening to his voice. By thinking of the actor who had become a ghost, they themselves became haunted houses.
- Sin Yong-Mok (translated by Brother Anthony)
Julian Stannard Surreal-Absurd Sampler
I started writing in earnest when I moved to Genoa in 1984. I lived in the Centro Storico, the city within the city, the largest extant medieval settlement in Europe – a labyrinth. I didn’t realise how much the strangeness of the place would get under my skin. Dickens writes about Genoa in Pictures from Italy and his account holds true today - a phantasmagoric interaction between grandeur and squalor.
The never-ending quest…
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