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10:09, Friday [finally], 5 November, 2010 – Atlanta
Lists. I think we will continue. You have a weekend ahead to go nuts collecting words, phrases, imagery, and lists. To go back to the Surrealists, mentioned in my last Friday Freeforall, when I discussed freewrites, I want to focus on their use of imagery, which bordered on the absurd but to them was a truth. Look at some surrealist paintings which to you may look wacky, but to the artists represented a truth about what they depicted. Why practice surreal imagery? Because it is fun. More importantly, if you, like I, have difficulty letting go of convention and the real, this is good practice.
The exercise is one given by a friend and former colleague, Jack Penha [writing name James Penha, poet, and publisher of The New Verse News, which “presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues”], during a class I took from him. Read through this list of images of the kind the Surrealists enjoy:
a sink full of Brussels sprouts
a dripping faucet
a young girl sings a song in the attic
the sound of someone swallowing
a wall made out of fur
the smell of wet dog hair
a bell ringing once every ________
a knife covered with sugar
cobwebs breaking across a face
a scorpion inside a head of lettuce
a doctor with a head that looks like a cabbage
a voice shouting, “One more time for our dead friends!”
a voice whispering
someone screaming, “Now! Now!”
a boy watching static on television
a mother and child sharing a cigar
a hairless dog
a ball rolling down a hallway
a girl who has no tongue trying to speak
an upside-down tree
a black lake
In the next 12 minutes, make up as many of your own surrealistic images as you can, to add to this list. Select a series of images that seem to you to work together in a surrealistic way and create a poem. Here’s my stab at it:
Flamingos walk into a dark tunnel
where a fan blows wind chimes soundless
while the knife whispers to the
fractured moonbeam shining through the
window: I will not hurt you and the
grinning woman in the corner slides
her rings over fleshless fingers and
rolls her eyeball inwards to watch
as her brain leaks out of her sockets
into a bathtub full of brussel sprouts
where a man is being stapled for
tripping over a rubberband while
painting layer upon layer of nail polish
on the walls of the dark tunnel into
which the flamingos walk.
So go ahead and let go. Go nuts. And, above all, have fun.