Lineage

A bird flies out of the stovepipe as the shadows of pears lengthen in the evening. The smell of mowed grass rises through the window. I pass behind the window-screen, thinking about the white cloth shaken out after supper, about the thick translucent cloth of sky. She simply disappeared. Last seen wearing blue jeans. Brown skin, blue shirt, blue. Knapsack. Kidnapped. Runaway. And so much nothing in between. Running as only she can run, the three pears in her pocket cutting a milky path through night. Inheritance of sidewalks, lineage of stars. Run, I whisper, twisted metal, three sweet pears to stars. Spirits speak you tongues, will speak you there.



Anne Shaw


Undertow
Persea Books

the bed charges along its rails of blue

Norman Dukes

"THE BED CHARGES ALONG ITS RAILS OF BLUE HONEY." --Andre Breton

The charges along its rails of blue honey
till the tires fly off to make piles of black gloves,
The charges along its rails of blue hoeney
till the steel wheels burn up, leaving behind
fountains filling with orange raindrops,
The charges along its rails blue honey
till the wooden wheels break into matchwood,
The bed charges along its rails of blue honey
till it slides, wheelless, into a sea of rope.

It floats on the sea of rope till it founders
in a hurricane of knots, that you undo, one by one, as you awake.

(Kayak 29:23)

Dwarf in the Shade of a Eucalyptus

No one's happy this morning
In the rubble at Nablus, the wreckway between
The Mount of Blessings and the Mount of Curses.
But I've been watching a goldfinch
Peck at the finch-feeder, heavy sock of seeds
Strangling from a green gallows.

In Kabul, the women breathe
Through dark veils down the dusty streets, as if
A dead odor rose from every door.
But I remember the fishing boats at Portofino,
And the blue harbor, and the sea
Licking its lips over the cold suicides.

Are there weevils in the glacier? Does the sun
Pour down like tar over
The inconvenient facts? I'm living as small as I can,
Inside the inch, on the second hand of time,
And still the stars light up the sky
Like Nero's garden, with its martyrs dipped in pitch.

Elton Glaser

Ulalume

We read this poem by Edgar Allan Poe for our grad course in Aestheticism and Decadence. The phantasmagoric element is evident, and if keep in mind Poe's poetic theory (explicated in "The Poetic Principle"), you can see him emphasizing artistic effect, elevating beauty and disposing of truth and goodness. The poem is rather creepy, but in almost all of his poems and stories he is aiming for a wierdly masochistic kind of pleasure.

The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere -
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir -
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Here once, through and alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul -
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll -
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole -
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.

Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere -
Our memories were treacherous and sere, -
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!) -
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here) -
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn -
As the star-dials hinted of morn -
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn -
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.

And I said: "She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs -
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies -
To the Lethean peace of the skies -
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes -
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes."

But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said: "Sadly this star I mistrust -
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Ah, hasten! -ah, let us not linger!
Ah, fly! -let us fly! -for we must."
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust -
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust -
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

I replied: "This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybilic splendour is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty tonight! -
See! -it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright -
We safely may trust to a gleaming,
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom -
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb -
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: "What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied: "Ulalume -Ulalume -
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere -
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: "It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed -I journeyed down here! -
That I brought a dread burden down here -
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber -
This misty mid region of Weir -
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

Bill Rasmovicz

Perhaps the most markatable side of American Surrealism is the Easter-European, politically haunted surrealism of Charles Simic, the new poet laureate. As Simic said at the National Book Festival last weekend, "I am also a hard realist." With this statement, Simic is seeking connect the experiential, narrative thread that his surreal images rely on. Like a jewel-studded tapestry, Simic's poems use surrealism like decorations. Going off of the little I know about Simic's work, I would venture a guess that he is popular as much because of the war-time Eastern Eurpean settings. His political dimension, in other words, is as important a part of his success as his skill with figures.

A brand new poet that could fall into this category--but might even transcend it-- is Bill Rasmovicz, who's first book, The World in Place of Itself, has just arrived. His work takes away the "laughter in my crusifixtion scene," and replaced it with the pastoral. And yet, he sounds much more like Simic than, say James Wright. His encounter with a moth in "On Becoming Light" is the sinousness of French surrealists and Spanish poets of the duende:

And there it was, the moth;
a child's hand wrestling itself in the grass.
Delirious, it fumbled its way out from the dark umbrella
of a tree, then landed on the stoop.

A frayed rope of light swung from the porch.
The moon was gorged on the dewy foment of summer.

I set my hand near, and it fluttered into my palm:
its weight no more than breath, its wings,
laments hammered into sheets of dust.

This abstract and aesthetic, yet narrative, landscape gives him the dream-tapestry of the golden age of European surrealism. Already breaking into poetry magazines and journals (including poems.com), Rasmovicz could be the one to carry on (or perfect?) the Simic torch.

Ars Metaphysica

Your head is a landscape revised by culm
and tire smoke, you stare through the window
as though words will appear,
heraldic and from nowhere.

Light as a paper bag, you amble about town
waiting for the wind to take hold.
You profess the body is a cello, and the moon
the eye by which you see.

You maintain your ancestors were barbarians,
that the tongue can out-leverage a crowbar.
You ascertain the weather with a fork
and an empty bottle of port.

Moths sleep under the mattresses of your eyelids.
You testify to wolves inhabiting your bones at night.
You claim the dead speak through you.

Crows circle your house like tiny hurricanes.
Saplings take root in your gutters.
Your own voice frightens you.
You're a liar, a thief. You're vain.

You believe you can extract silence from a stone.
You contend the friction between pen and paper
creates light. You believe the darkness
is larger than any space can hold.

Poem of Low Latitudes

Let's crumple calendars, smash watches.

Let's throw ropes around the Moon,
never stop swallowing its linens.

Let's recline the way the horizon does,
every evening, yawning across Tropic lines.

Let's fill a hammock with limes.

Let's fall asleep on the reef,
stare up through clear water at trembling stars.

Let's climb a coconut tree & squeal like monkeys.

Let's ride a trade wind like paper airplanes.

Let's watch the sky wheel & wheel
from under straw hats.

Let's count a billion stars,
lose track at a billion minus one, then start over,
until we glitter with white sand.

Let's tumble together until the earth is flat.

Let me sail like Magellan into you,
unfold the maps of your roundness.

Let's hope for the volcano.

Let's reinvent the godless universe ballooning.

Let's crawl into a conch shell
& bang on a bongo.

Let's build a bonfire
that boils away the atmosphere.

Let's sublimate, evaporate, condense.

Let's get drunk on the real stars—
helium engines strumming
our own cores to a glow.

Let me wear your warm skin.

Let's simplify: skin, nerve, synapse, nucleus,
hydrogen, quark, the unpronounceable....



Mike Dockins
Slouching in the Path of a Comet

"The world goes back into a sack"

Welcome to American Surrealist.

This site concerns the surreal, especially as it occurs in North and South American poetry and art. It will feature:

1. the art and poetry of contemporary surrealists
2. reviews of recent and contemporary surrealist works
3. news and coverage of exhibitions and events of surrealist organizations
4. inquiries into the history, limitations and theoretical implications of the various kinds of American surrealism.

We will look into history and the future, but there no time as precise and lasting as the now. And there is no continent in need of surrealism like America. And there are no poets as strong and clear as the surrealists.