Stephen Sunderland Surreal-Absurd Sampler

ARTIST STATEMENT

"When I first started writing poetry, as a teenager, I was convinced it was some form of ‘inner lightning’ which I had to capture through performance or by staying up all night waiting for it to strike. Sometimes it did, but rarely. When I found Surrealism, I was attracted by its extremism – but whilst automatism is invigorating it’s also exhausting. I’m glad to have found other surrealist methods enabling me to ‘manifest’ my writing using chance: synthetic criticism, collage, games (of analogy, exquisite corpse, variants) which led me onto more performative kinds of assemblage. I enjoy the play of sounds, the asemic, the machine-created; lots of loosely-held conceptual and constraint-driven processes teaching me to channel, stand aside from myself and hold things lightly; and whilst the poems aren’t necessarily always comedic, they come with a sense of irony.”—Stephen Sunderland

INTERESTS:

Lim(inal)-Animals and surrealist eco-poetry, poetry as alchemy, surrealism of the quotidian & the gaslit state, unfilmable films and the vanished perspectives of cinema, including its ghosts.

BIO:

Stephen Sunderland is the author of The Cinema Beneath the Lake, a surrealist film-novel, three BBC radio dramas - Ice Dreams, Paradise Hazard, Phonebreaker – and two vispo pamphlets, Eye Movement (Steel Incisors, 2022) and Refrains (forthcoming Steel Incisors, 2023) His work also appears in anthologies Seen as Read (Kingston University Press 2021) and Seeing in Tongues (forthcoming Steel Incisors, 2023);  and in publications such as the feminist-surrealist journal The Debutante and Lune: A Journal of Literary Misrule.

Find him on Twitter @stephensunderla

and on Mastodon @Corsairsanglot@mastodon.social