What is surrealist poetry? An introductory talk by Gary Cummiskey

The following is the English version of an introductory talk I gave at a surrealist poetry event I participated in the Dai Art Gallery, Zamalek, in Cairo, on 14 December, 2022. The event was hosted by Mohsen L Belasy and Ghadah Kamal Ahmed.

An Arabic translation of the talk appears in Sulfur 'Surrealist Jungle'.

What is surrealist poetry?

It was about a month ago that Mohsen asked me to give a talk for this evening on ‘What is surrealist poetry?’ My reply at the time was that this was an almost impossible question to answer comprehensively, and that I was not sure if I could answer it. Now it is a month later, and I still do not have a comprehensive answer. And besides, I am suspicious of answers, and much prefer questions.

What is surrealist poetry? Well, among the French-language poets, we may have read Breton, Éluard, Péret and the great post-Second World War poet Joyce Mansour, who was Egyptian. 

Joyce Mansour

When we read their work we should get an idea of what constitutes surrealist poetry. And among the English poets, if we read the early work of David Gascoyne or Philip O’Connor, or that of Roger Roughton or Roland Penrose, we may get an idea of what constitutes surrealist poetry to the English. And then in the US, there is the work of the great Philip Lamantia – ‘the voice that rises once in a hundred years’ – as Breton said about him, or the work of the contemporary surrealist poet Will Alexander, and also the late Ronnie Burk. Unfortunately I cannot speak about surrealist poetry in Latin America, other European countries such as Spain, Portugal or Romania, or even countries such as Egypt, because I am not knowledgeable enough.

Philip Lamantia

But to get back to the question. For me, a problem with trying to explain something, to define it, is to risk limiting and restricting it – and that is the exact opposite of what surrealism has always been about.  If we say, for example, as is usually said, that surrealist poetry is characterised by dream imagery, then we are saying that surrealist poetry should contain dream imagery.  But is that true? And if we say that surrealist poetry is the result of automatic writing, then we are saying that surrealist poetry must have been written quickly and without conscious intervention or revision. But we know that is not true – Breton himself rejected automatic writing as far back as 1930. And neither Aragon, Char, nor Éluard – the great poets of surrealism –  ever practised automatic writing.

For myself, as much as I admire Breton, Éluard and Péret among the French-language surrealist poets, I much prefer the work of the more borderline or renegade surrealists – poets such as Artaud, Prévert, and some of the members of Le Grand Jeu, such as René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. None of these poets produced poetry that can be immediately recognised or labelled as surrealist. That is because their poems do not have the outward characteristics of what is considered surrealist poetry.

René Daumal

And in the post-Second World War period, moving into the 1950s and 1960s, I admire the work of the PANic movement – Arrabal, Jodorowsky, and Topor. There is the story of how Jodorowsky travelled from Chile to France determined to rescue surrealism, and when he finally met Breton, he was dismayed to find that the great leader of surrealism did not like rock music (actually Breton did not like any music!), science fiction, or comics. And so Jodo decided to form PANic.

 And among the American poets, much as I admire Lamantia, I also have tremendous admiration for the work of Bob Kaufman and Marty Matz, who are more usually associated with the beats than with surrealism. Then there is the psychedelic work of the poet, photographer, and film maker Ira Cohen, who would rigorously shake off any label, whether  ‘surrealist’ or ‘beat’.

Bob Kaufman

Ira Cohen

And then what do we make of the poetry of the US surrealist Ted Joans, who declared ‘Jazz is my religion, and surrealism my point of view’? As much as many of his poems are dedicated to surrealists, such as Joyce Mansour, with whom he collaborated, or reference surrealism or surrealists – a fairly famous one is about Breton – they generally do not have the characteristics of what we would expect from ‘surrealist poetry’. They are closer to jazz poetry, and indeed, Joans’s poetry seems more influenced by jazz than by surrealism. He is as frequently referred to as a jazz poet as he is referred to as a surrealist poet. He is seen by some as one of the fathers of spoken-word poetry. Yet Breton called him ‘the only authentic African-American surrealist of the hippie generation in America’.

 I have also been asked about surrealism in South Africa. Well, there is not much happening with regard to surrealism in South Africa, and certainly not amongst poets. One notable figure, however, was Sinclair Beiles, about whom I compiled a book, titled Who was Sinclair Beiles? Sinclair is better known for being a collaborator on the book of cut-ups called Minutes to Go, with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. He also helped with the editing and publication of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. But he was also tremendously influenced by dada and surrealism, and while he was in Paris, in the 1950s, he met Breton and Tzara. He also later became very close friends with the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis, who edited Sinclair’s selected poems, titled A South African Abroad. There is a long poem of Sinclair’s called Illuminations in White Tobacco Smoke, which is based on a poem by Tzara and dedicated to Artaud. In a documentary in the mid-1990s, Sinclair dismissed much South African poetry as ‘social realism’ and said he regarded his own work as surrealist. 

Sinclair Beiles

Incidentally, Sinclair once gave a poetry reading here in Egypt, at a Grateful Dead concert, when they performed at the pyramids in Giza in 1978.

 Well, I realise this talk has been rather meandering and so I want to return to the beginning, to the question ‘What is surrealist poetry’? Because, as I have already said,  I am aware of the dangers of definition, and I am even more aware of the danger of confusing outward characteristics with substance. In my opinion there is much contemporary, or near-contemporary, surrealist poetry that too often reads like a translation from the 1920s French. Such surrealist poetry is hardly innovative, but rather imitative, and if you want to bring a political slant into it, you could say that such poetry is more reactionary than revolutionary. It is such poetry that tucks surrealism safely away in museums and on to the walls of corporate boardrooms. It also reminds me of something that Sinclair Beiles wrote, that in its quest for unusual images, much (not all) surrealist poetry had become ‘mannered’, producing ‘beautiful seashells devoid of life’.

Ted Joans

In closing, I would like the quote the words of Ted Joans – words he uttered when I met him in Johannesburg in early 1994. Those words were: ‘The fantasy fades, but the surrealism remains’. He did not explain what he meant by that, but for me it is a matter of pointing out that the outward characteristics of ‘typical’ surrealist poems  – with images of oranges eating horses and eyebrows climbing over bannisters  (and those are my images, by the way, so you can’t use them!) –– will perhaps not fade as such, but become, in the words of Sinclair, ‘beautiful seashells devoid of life’. But the substance of surrealist poetry –– the spirit of surrealism – will remain.