Do Women Writers Care About Surrealism? How many women poets make it into these types of lists/anthologies? Are they thought of first as female poets, then as surrealist writers? I don't know. I was pretty upset by the list, by the lack of female participation in the conversation, and by the lack of women on the lists generated by men (what did they mention, six or seven female poets? in the whole post? c'mon?). I'm not going to make a list/anthology of female poets who practice surrealism because I don't like the term 'surrealism' to begin with, but someone should.
Unsubstantiated theory: Surrealism is what you write when you have nothing of substance to say.
ReplyDeleteFighting words!
ReplyDeleteI haven't really thought it out too thoroughly, but it feels like oppressed people wouldn't bother with surrealism. Like surrealism is essentially a bourgeois, privileged art. Not that that makes it bad, but....
ReplyDeleteThe post and comments seem to indicate a level of ignorance of Surrealism, (past and present), and the usual misunderstandings about the number of women previously and currently involved:
ReplyDeleteThe anthology indicated below is still the best reference:
http://www.surrealistmovement-usa.org/pages/swallmy.html
I guess I am pretty ignorant of the history of surrealism and female input into the "movement," "school"? Idk, what to call surrealism because I don't like to refer to poetry as being surreal. I think that it is just a borrowed term from visual art. All good poetry is at once both concrete and abstract; material and ethereal, so as a temporal/era defining moniker, surrealism isn't useful. It isn't useful because the term can be used to describe almost anyone. I think Emily Dickinson, who had nothing to do with the visual art movement of surrealism or with surrealist poets of the 20th century, is surreal at times and definitely makes some surrealist leaps in her poems.
ReplyDeleteAlso, totally agree with Elisa. I think all poetry is a pretty bourgeois thing, but surrealism is maybe the bourgeoist type. At least in conceptual writing you have to be smart at the outset of the project, and with the confessional you have some skin in the game. But from the way I look at it, surrealism requires little emotion or intelligence to begin the process.
I was thinking about this yesterday at my bourgeois gym, and I also feel that good poetry is inherently "surreal"/unreal/nonreal to some degree (metaphor, the lyric leap, etc.), but the term "surrealism" usually only applies to a very narrow slice of poetry -- I think of the French (male) surrealists and, basically, people who imitate them to some degree, like Edson and Tate and Schomburg. What's kind of funny is that Dada and surrealism were originally a response to bourgeois values.
ReplyDeleteDefinition of surrealism: "Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought." That is pretty much my definition of poetry, if you leave out the second line: "Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason." Obviously, most surrealist writers don't completely abandon reason or logic either, otherwise it would be Dada.
Also, Monsieur Anonymous, I took a class on surrealism and Dada in college, and I don't believe we read a single text by a woman.
ReplyDeleteAlso: Surrealism meant something in the '20s that it can't mean now. It stood in starker contrast to the other poetry that was being written.
ReplyDeleteHi Uncanny and Elisa,
ReplyDeleteSurrealism can mean what it did in the 1920s and something different (because even then it meant wildly different things, thus the expulsions). I can't remember the exact details of that conversation we had on Montevidayo, since it was quite a long time ago, but I tend to use "surrealism" from the other side of a negative, a dismissal; I use it as a very provisional, unstable term, as a term that eats itself (in ways that even this post suggests).
The fact that Elisa rejects it as essentially "privileged" is exactly the kind of dimissal I am interested in: because it's essentially the kind of rhetoric by which ART ITSELF is often dismissed (and has been criticized for ages). It's a connection between monetary luxury and a sense of the aesthetic as luxurious (ie a metaphor and this metaphor goes way back, Milton associated figurative language with Satan). Elisa's comment that surrealism doesn't have anything "substantial" is standard expression of this rhetoric/ideology, one which we could of course extend to: art is something you do when you have nothing substantial to say. Which makes me think: What is something "substantial" to say? Who decides? I tend to think that this kind of defensiveness about surrealism/art invokes exactly a key component of art's powers (virtuality, insubstantiality, fakeness).
Elisa, I think you're factually incorrect when you say that oppressed people have not been drawn to surrealism. If there is such a demographic as "oppressed people" (which seems a pretty general but massively unstable term/demographic as well) they have actually incredibly much been drawn to surrealism: think of heaps of european poets during WWII, during the cold war; think of Cesaire and negritude, Neruda fighting colonialism in Latin America etc etc. And your erroneous claim comes from this ideological conception of surrealism (or Art) as useless luxury not applicable for people with "real struggles.".
As for women and surrealism: Surrealism was actually pretty quick to include women and if I were to make a list of poets who were "surrealists" (in its massively unstable definition) a lot, perhaps most of them and certainly a majority, would be women. I'm not at all worried about this concern, especially since I've spent a substantial amount of my efforts translating and publishing women poets who could be seen as "surrealist" (I've translated four books by Aase Berg who actually was a member of a surrealist group in the 80s and 90s - so surrealist by much more standard definitions than the one I'm using).
To me these reactions seem very typical of the way surrealism is used in contemporary american poetry discussions - a luxury, a privilege, artificial, immoral - and I've written quite a bit about that on Montevidayo. For example: http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=1728. Or: http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2091. I happen to think Art is incredibly important.
Johannes
Johannes, I don't reject surrealism. I think art that comes out of "having nothing to say" can be just as interesting as an art that comes out of oppression. I was just stating a theory, not a preference.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing: Penelope Rosemount actually edited a wonderful anthology of women and surrealism about 10 years ago./Johannes
ReplyDeleteJohannes, I feel you're willfully misinterpreting me here: "The fact that Elisa rejects it as essentially 'privileged' is exactly the kind of dimissal I am interested in: because it's essentially the kind of rhetoric by which ART ITSELF is often dismissed (and has been criticized for ages)." Where do I reject and dismiss it?
ReplyDeleteSome time ago in Eastern Europe many poets wrote "surrealism" in order to write of political events in a kind of "code" that the censors would not "get." Same thing in today's Vietnam -- many many surrealists. It is their freedom in an oppressive censorious country. Linh Dinh gave a lecture on that topic at Naropa. Interesting. In Japan, surrealism served the same purpose before WWII, when it was squelched. Surrealism affords the way to say the thing you are not supposed to say. I love surrealism.
ReplyDelete