The Surreal-Absurd: An Open-Ended Movement
Collage by John Maradik
Surreal-absurd began quietly, almost accidentally. After reading Marcus Silcock’s prose-poetry collection, The Green Monk, I asked him if he would consider setting up a new section for the magazine. The idea was to archive a new kind of surrealist poetry, one that combined surrealism with elements of minimalism, absurdism, and story-telling—much like Marcus’s own work. Although many writers were experimenting in this space, their work seemed scattered across diverse journals without a single centre of gravity. We felt passionately about this emerging form, not just for its immediacy, inventiveness, and lovely weirdness, but also for its non-elitism, its openness, its accessibility. We live in a time when poetry often risks becoming an academic exercise, read and enjoyed by other poets and critics, but too cryptic for non-poet readers. We wanted to challenge that norm and help consolidate a truly popular form that spoke to the times and could be enjoyed by all kinds of readers.
Mercurius Magazine would become a home for this emerging form, and we would call it ‘surreal-absurd’ to distinguish it from twentieth century surrealism. However, it’s probably best not to think too much about the label. There are more similarities than differences between historical surrealism and the surreal-absurd.
Marcus got the ball rolling, and later invited Vik Shirley—herself a surreal-absurd poet—to join Mercurius’s editorial team. Vik poured energy into the project: she curated fortnightly samplers for a year, hosted surreal-absurd events, and made the excellent decision to invite Ben Niezpodziany, who runs Piżama Press, into the fold. Four years later, we’ve archived over 90 poets. What began as an experimental idea is now Mercurius’s raison d’être. And all of this done with zero budget. The four of us have dedicated hundreds of hours to making the surreal-absurd what it is today. The result is a remarkable anthology—a document of an unfolding movement. One of Mercurius’s founding mission’s was to counter fragmentation in the digital age. To bring together artists. To join the dots. To consolidate community. This print version of the series is the final piece of that puzzle. The end of one cycle, and perhaps the beginning of another.
Why is the surreal-absurd such a good companion for these strange times? What are its key characteristics? I’ll explore these questions in the pages ahead. However, the answers will be open-ended insofar as I neither possess nor desire a definitive response as to what the surreal-absurd is. Rather, I aim to celebrate its diversity by exploring some of the nooks and crannies of its moods and meanings. The other editors—Ben, Vik, and Marcus—have often said that the surreal-absurd should be a broad church without a fixed narrative. I hope this essay reflects that spirit.
Surrealism and pop surrealism
There are striking similarities between pop surrealism, a movement in the arts world, and the surreal-absurd. Born in the 1990s, pop surrealism rebels against what Alexandra Mazzanti, director of Dorothy Circus gallery—the UK’s foremost venue for pop surrealism—calls the ‘tired trajectory of abstract and conceptual art no longer reflective of contemporary sentiment’. She told me in an interview that ‘pop surrealists try to be less intellectual, more inclusive, and reach out to a broader audience than their historical counterparts’. They also ‘come from around the world’ and blend ‘local styles and cultures with the overarching pop surrealism aesthetic’.
Much the same could be said of the surreal-absurd, its mission to be popular, and its rejection of overly cryptic, academic-style poetry. Like pop surrealist painters, surreal-absurd poets work across a wide emotional range, from the humorous and the whimsical, to the philosophical and the spiritual, to the dark and the absurd. Surrealism in the 21st century often feels less like a concrete aesthetic than a way of being and seeing. The art that flows from that way of being/seeing takes many forms.
One common thread—an essential part of that way of being/seeing—is a paradoxical sense that the ‘realistic’ fails to reflect reality. Artists must break or bend the rules of literal truth to reveal the psychic truth. That could mean exploring dream-scapes, unpicking oppressive social and economic systems, reflecting on absurd human relations, coming to terms with the dizzying pace of technological change, creating a space of pure play, or describing the spirit world. Every surreal-absurd author has a unique relationship with the surreal, though behind each approach is a shared conviction: realism isn’t enough to say what they need to say or show what they have seen.
Surrealism as realism
Some surreal-absurd poets claim their work is not surreal, but rather a direct reflection of reality—as they perceive it. Howie Good rejects both the surrealist and absurdist labels, calling his work ‘a realistic depiction of the mad, violent, disjointed times we’re living in’. His poem ‘Disco Demolition Night’ evokes a Baudrillardian sense of hyperreality. It describes an unnamed political tragedy in terms of a ‘disco’, where ‘white swirls of smoke’ after a bombing hang ‘suspended in the crystal ball of a daytime moon’. It’s a cutting image, especially in a world where a former reality TV star has become the 47th president of the United States. In a televised interview, Donald Trump, and Vice President J.D. Vance publicly berated Ukraine’s wartime leader Volodymyr Zelensky. At its conclusion, Trump declared the meeting ‘great television’. One is left wondering what the point of it was: to advance a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine or stage a spectacle? The exchange, which bore more resemblance to the Jerry Springer show than high-stakes diplomacy, blurred the line between reality and surreality, seriousness and farce. Good’s ‘disco ball’ moon may not be literally true, but psychically, it resonates. Its surreal image suits the strangeness of a war-torn world dominated by performance politics, where controversy and entertainment intertwine to seize airtime and advance political agendas.
Surrealism and modern life
Surrealism is uniquely equipped to address the strangeness of modern life. ‘The only thing that fanatically attracts me,’ wrote Jindřich Štyrský in Prague in 1935, ‘is searching for surreality in everyday objects.’ While Howie Good probes the deranged spectacle of postmodern civilization, others focus on the quotidian. In ‘Self-Portrait’, Yi Won writes: ‘I put my head on display at Islan Market, but after several days no one bought it’. The narrator has also put their head ‘up for auction online but got a notification that when you click my head an hourglass appears, a loading error’. The poem defamiliarizes the oppressive tendencies of an image-obsessed techno-capitalist economy, where one’s self-image is a commodity, filtered through social media and profile pictures. Won takes this tension to surrealistic extremes by having the narrator literally sell her own head. Similarly, in ‘Everyone is a comedy lost on the way home’, Aaron Kent writes: ‘I cannot tell if I am real,/ or if I am just an avatar / eating myself from the inside.’ Simon Collings sees writing gibberish as a way to ‘defamiliarize the mundane to make it strange and interesting again’.
Surrealism also offers a refuge from the modern world: a space without fixed rules where logic can loosen and the imagination roam freely. Jane Yeh is drawn to the surreal because she is ‘easily bored’ and enjoys discovering ‘what might come next’. Ian McMillan’s first surreal thought was born out of boredom: during a dull bus journey, he declared he would ‘wash his hands in a bowl made from old leather cucumbers’ when he got home. This got a laugh from his pals and opened a surreal door in his thirteen-year-old-head.
Ben Niespodziany writes that he is ‘often either bored or overwhelmed with reality. Too much stressful hustle and bustle, or too much mundane routine.’ To disrupt this, he reaches for ‘surreal poetry, off-kilter novels, hallucinatory films, atmospheric albums’. His poems ‘The devil suggests’ and ‘Robes thrown onto locusts’ embrace free association, piling disconnected phrases and images on top of each other to create a dream-like story and atmosphere. The reader may forge the fragments into a whole; or leave them be, content in their weird remove from the mundane.
Surrealism and technology
Social Media—along with the rise of profile pics and selfies—is just one symptom of the rapid technological upheaval of the last two decades. What once belonged to science fiction—artificial intelligence, the internet, smartphones, drones—is now the furniture of modern life, normalised and unremarkable.
Technology has transformed society in ways that are often absurd, surreal, and deeply unsettling. The popularity of dystopian TV shows like ‘Black Mirror’ speaks to our horror and fascination with this new normal. John Maradik’s ‘D’Internet’ satirises the all-consuming nature of digital life. ‘people just sat there / had long wars or / drooled into their hands / before D’Internet emerged’, he quips. The irony is that there are still long wars and doomscrollers do just sit there drooling most of the time. Where is the promised land of techno-utopia? Every year the world seems increasingly difficult to live in. Technology offers new possibilities for convenience but it also creates problems, such as wealth concentration among a new class of tech lords, labour market disruptions, the increased digitisation of social interactions, privacy and surveillance issues, and social-media-amplified misinformation.
Humour and irony enable Maradik to critique modern life without sounding sententious. Other poets take different angles. Kristin Bock, who describes her poems as ‘thaumaturgy’, defamiliarizes drones in ‘how drones are born’, breathing new life into the creepy doll trope in the process. Jane Yeh offers a playful take on tech. Her whimsical poem ‘The Robots’ parodies the terminator and other dystopian tales of artificial intelligence gone rogue.
Surrealism and radical politics
Since its conception, revolution has been a central idea for surrealism. Early surrealists viewed language as a site of bourgeois control. Artists should subvert realism to free themselves from the oppressive forces of capitalism and their monopoly on reality. André Breton—a divisive figure to be sure, given his tendency to expel comrades from the movement—was a dedicated communist.
That radical legacy is still alive among some surreal-absurd poets. Sophie Herxheimer views surrealism as a way of ‘breaking chains’ and ‘reversing some of the apparent logic’ that dominates culture. Critiques of late-stage capitalism don’t have to be gloomy and Kafkaesque; horror also dwells in the frenetic and the humorous. Jeff Hilson’s ‘the Wogan Poem’ explores money, finance and the web of hyperconsumerism. The fast-paced, unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness evokes the frantic, absurd needs of the consumer rushing from one purchase to the next, seeking ever more bizarre fetishes such as ‘a Davina mccall vinyl dumbbell set’ or a ‘my little pony tilt ‘n’ turn scooter’. Aaron Kent insists that the ‘surreal and the political’ are inseparable. ‘The subversion of tropes and reaction against hegemonic standards presents an opportunity to make readers see the world, and therefore their allegiances, with fresh eyes,’ he argues. His political stance is a good counter to those who might cast the surreal-absurd as a flight of fancy devoid of substance.
Surrealism and humour
In some of the more absurdist strands of the surreal-absurd, humour is a way to cope with or at least acknowledge the horrors of life. If you don’t laugh, you cry. That kind of thing. The joke leads you into a strange room; the punchline is the door closing behind you. Vik Shirley’s poems from her collection Corpses mix references to the spectacle or ‘reality show’ with grotesque images and a dark humour. Beneath their flippant tone lies a serious, often unsettling insight into the structure of existence.
Humour can also open a window onto a world that lives just beneath the surface of the conscious mind. Zachary Schomburg’s humour provides a setting for the inexplicable, the dream-like and the unnameable. In ‘Lucky Donkey’, the narrator talks about their preference for a lucky donkey over a good bush, commenting obliquely on the nature of chance and chaos and dream, of individual existence stranded amid vast, impersonal forces. Rather than explaining these forces in any rational way, Schomburg offers a feeling towards them, a poetic gesture that might not be as light-hearted and comic as it first appears. Note how the poem starts with the line ‘I used to know a lucky donkey’ (emphasis mine). This could imply regret, assuming the times of both lucky donkeys and good bushes are over. This is a recurring motif throughout Schomburg’s oeuvre: sparkling surfaces that camouflage a deeper melancholy and pensiveness.
Humour can ease the tension of rigid social strictures. In Liam Bates’ ‘On their Radar’, the narrator secretly trashes the neighbourhood when ‘heavy wind is forecast’. Descriptions of their antics provoke a wry smile, but the real strangeness comes when the mayor, keen to find a scapegoat for the vandalism, suggests a ‘sacrifice may be in order’ and asks for a volunteer. The lightness and prankish spirit of the poem sidesteps into a nightmare. It is a ridiculous nightmare that makes you laugh while also demanding to be taken seriously.
Luke Kennard’s ‘A Pergola of Exceptional Beauty’ creates an absurd juxtaposition: a highly inadivsable sexual relationship with a ghost and a painfully boring work meeting. The result is as surreal as Lautréamont’s ‘chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.’ Tom Jenks, in Humboldt, imagines a squid learning jiu-jitsu online and cracking coconuts with its beak while worrying it won’t feel anything if its housemate dies. Beneath the slapstick lies a meditation on isolation, emotional inertia, and the surreal compromises people make to stay connected in relationships.
Surrealism and formal experimentation
Surrealism has always walked hand-in-hand with formal experimentation. Mercurius’s Images section features cut-up poems, collages, and visual poems. Visual poets challenge the boundary between image and text, drawing attention to the unconscious biases behind categories like ‘poem’ or ‘image’. Many artists find the automatic creative processes behind producing collages and found-word poems liberating. The closest this anthology gets to full-on visual poetry is Sascha A. Akhtar’s poems, which appear with blurred words and imperfections in the background, as if to blur the line between word and space, conscious and unconscious.
Formal experimentation may also mean playing with the expectations that come with certain kinds of texts. Lorelei Bacht subverts the form of the glossary. Her definitions create a subjective blue print for suffering—a far cry from the expectation that glossaries should clarify unusual words. Rather it is ordinary words that are made strange and unfamiliar.
Surrealism and the prose-poem
The surreal-absurd delights in minimalist prose-poetry, in spinning weird yet resonant yarns in a paragraph or so of poetic prose. Not every poet in this anthology uses it, but many do—and for good reason. Breton cites various prose-poems in his manifesto and surrealists such as David Gascoigne, George Seferis, Anzai Fuye, and Cesar Vallejo all used the medium, as did early symbolists such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The form has enjoyed particular prestige in the US, with heavyweights like James Tate—an important reference point for many authors in this collection—popularising the form.
The minimalist language setting of the prose-poem allows its surreal elements to shine without formal artifice—like rhyme, meter, and line breaks—getting in the way. It is also well suited to pared down story-telling, which is often the beating heart of a surreal-absurd prose-poem. Cassandra Atherton, who has written extensively on prose-poetry, says ‘the use of the sentence … rather than the line, has the capacity to heighten a prose poem’s rendering of the extraordinary because of the disjuncture between the familiar mode of address and defamiliarizing poetic tropes. These tropes also gain added energy when pressed between the walls of a fully justified block of text.’ Her own prose-poem ‘Trash’ defamiliarizes a quotidian object—the computer desktop trash can—by giving it a vital and oddly tragic voice.
Surrealism and psychoanalysis
Surrealism has deep roots in psychoanalysis. Published in 1900, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams provided an early source of inspiration for surrealists keen to explore the workings of the unconscious mind. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul,C.G. Jung extols the benefits of painting one’s dreams. ‘Were his fantasy really senseless to him [the patient],’ he writes, ‘the effort to paint it would be so irksome that he could scarcely be brought to perform this exercise a second time. But since his fantasy does not seem to him entirely senseless, his busying himself with it increases its effect upon him. Moreover, the effort to give visible form to the image enforces a study of it in all its parts, so that in this way its effects can be completely experienced.’ In his artist’s statement, Schomburg writes that his multi-volumed collection Fjords tracks his dreams and the dreams of other people, as well as his ‘evolving relationship’ with death, love, light, and the prose poem.
Dreams are neither random nor senseless, but cracks that let in light from another world. Many surreal-absurd poets enjoy basking in this light. For Nidia Hernández, that light illumines a more authentic being, or as she puts it, ‘immense unreality, my only home’.
Surrealism and spirituality
Dreams can be a gateway to the spirit world. Ancient Greek myths spoke of dreams passing through either the gate of horn or the gate of ivory. Both gates were entrances to the underworld. The gate of ivory enabled the passage of false dreams; the gate of horn true ones with prophetic messages to impart. Horn (keras) means ‘fulfilling’ or ‘achieving’, while ivory (elephas) sounds like ‘deceive’ (elephairomai).
The spirit world, which exists both within and beyond the material world, defies ordinary human logic. In David Lynch’s surrealistic ‘Twin Peaks’—often cited as one of the greatest TV shows ever made—magical beings from the spirit world, some of them guardian-like figures—speak backwards and communicate only through cryptic signs. The language of the material world—and all words derive from earthly matter—fails to serve them. Nor do their communications cross over easily into the material world. In my poem ‘The Key Maker’, I contemplate the spirit world (loosely based on Celtic folklore) as a place accessible only through fantasy and dream logic. Marcus Silcock’s ‘Great Expectations’ touches on the psychic cannibalism that underpins so many human relations.
The surreal-absurd also has a space for classic meditations on loss and longing. Chrissy Williams gives a weird twist to a traditional spiritual theme: the transient nature of things. Her stream-of-consciousness-style delivery leaves the contemplation hanging in the air like a wisp of smoke already beginning to dissipate. Instead of Romantic depictions of autumnal trees, we find the irreal cityscape of Los Angeles and an unpicking of status anxiety. The message is zen: this changing world is a source of weirdness and tension, but also pleasure and innocence. Who ‘wouldn’t want to fall in love with everything, to reach a hand out the window as it all breezes past?’
Surrealism and the Anthropocene/Capitalocene
We live in an anxious age—a ‘poly-crisis’ era, defined by ecosystem collapse, mass extinction, climate change, geopolitical instability, and deepening inequalities. These crises feed into and amplify each other. Coined by atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen around the year 2000, the term ‘Anthropocene’ suggests that human activities have transformed the Earth to such an extent that these changes mark a new geological epoch distinct from the Holocene. Given capitalism’s role in accelerating environmental destruction, historian and sociologist Jason W. Moore promoted the term ‘Capitalocene’ over ‘Anthropocene’. He argued that it’s not humanity as a whole but capitalism—with its demand for endless growth, commodification of nature, extraction of resources and labor, and unequal distribution of harm—that bears responsibility.
These concepts deeply affect the arts and contemporary surrealism is no exception. Many pop surrealist painters turn to animistic visions of nature to restore value to ecosystems looted and ransacked under the indifferent gaze of an anthropomorphic god. In the surreal-absurd, weird creatures that evoke a non-human intelligence often appear (e.g. Schomburg’s lucky donkey). Adam J. Maynard’s ‘The Wasteland’ has nothing of T.S. Eliot’s grimness. Instead, there is wonder for a world that has returned to nature. A non-human voice—a spider— speaks. Maynard captures the painful insight that a ruin for humans is a paradise for other life-forms. Its tone is wonder but its essence is elegy.
Surrealism and Asia-Pacific
Surrealism long ago transcended its origins as a Paris-centred movement. Today it takes many forms across the globe. Korea and Japan are especially fertile ground, and the surreal-absurd features many Korean and Japanese poets in translation. I have already mentioned Yi Won’s unsettling reflections on identity and roleplay in the techno-capitalist economy. Kim Hyseoon writes about her invisible cats and the eggs they lay. Satoshi Iwai, who writes in both Japanese and English, says he doesn’t ‘know how to be a surrealist when the real world is more absurd than my dreams’. The anthology also includes poet and translator Jake Levine, who edits the highly recommended Moon Country Korean Poetry Series for Black Ocean.
Surrealism and science
The paradox of science is that the road of reason leads to the palace of weirdness. Ask any quantum physicist and they’ll tell you that the universe is a strange place indeed and human intuition is almost always wrong. Simply put, things are not what they seem. The Catholic church once placed Galileo under house arrest for declaring that the Earth orbits the sun. His thesis contradicted centuries of received wisdom and religious dogma. Things have only grown weirder. We now know that the earth is miniscule next to the cosmos. There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on every beach on Earth.
There is a natural surreality to the vertiginous scale of the universe. Even rational accounts sound surreal. Our limited perceptive faculties struggle to process the enormity. Chris Gutkind’s ‘Around Us’ plays with this sense of scale by casting the universe as a speck of dust on a cabinet overdue for cleaning. He admits that he feels like an ‘imposter’ in surrealism, calling his work ‘utterly real’. The poem’s image of a cosmic ‘cleaner’ who may soon wipe existence into oblivion is both fanciful and rooted in a long tradition of memento mori. Zen Master Ryokan once wrote ‘blossoms in bloom are also falling blossoms’. The universe is expanding, driven by a mysterious force known as dark energy. But is that expansion not also a kind of fall? Nothing is stable, everything changes. Scientists predict that in four billion years the Milky Way will begin to collide with Andromeda, initiating a violent process of destruction and re-creation as the two galaxies merge. In the ‘big crunch’ view, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself and creation start anew. In the ‘big freeze’ view, galaxies will get so far apart that they recedebeyond our observable horizon, moving away faster than the speed of light. Even if there are some stars left, their light will never reach us. The universe will become an infinitely dark place, a kind of eternal graveyard. By inventing the fanciful figure of the cleaner, Gutkind gestures toward the limits of knowledge. We know nothing about the fate of the universe except that it can’t last forever. Or at least not in its present form. That alone is a kind of existential gut-shot and a rallying cry for absurdism.
Surrealism and the imagination
While all the serious points mentioned so far (philosophy, science, spirituality, politics etc) are valid, depending on the poet, the surreal-absurd can also be a place of pure play. There are poems that sing for the sheer joy of the singing. Evan Nicholls is especially candid about this motive. ‘My work engages the surreal for two reasons: fun and ease,’ he writes. ‘In writing, I haven’t found anything that comes as natural as the absurd and unnatural. Or as entertaining.’ His poems feel like a cross between haikus and flash fiction: tiny narratives that leave a single, often comic image hanging in the air.
Concluding thoughts
In this brief exploration, my aim hasn’t been to define the surreal-absurd, but sketch its potential and show why it makes such a great companion for these times. No doubt I’ve missed some important points. No doubt I’ve read some poems in ways that the author never intended. But if you feel excited about forging your own relationship with the texts that lie ahead, then this essay has done its job.
In keeping with the surreal-absurd mission to remain open-ended and inclusive (pluralistic, even), a short ‘artistic statement’ precedes each set of poems. These aim to give the poets themselves a chance to explain their connection to surrealism. They also bring the writer closer to the reader and enrich the larger conversation.
