By Craig Wilson
The point of surrealist poetry is not to simply write something off the wall or weird…it’s to break down the walls between your conscious and unconscious mind, to integrate different levels of the mental personality by tapping into the continuous stream of images flowing beneath the conscious threshold of the psyche. The surrealist poem will necessarily be informed by conscious and unconscious dynamics to different degrees.
When you’re half asleep or waking up and you have words and pictures coming into your mind spontaneously, without having to reach for them or try to form them, that is one example of a surrealist experience, and it’s the ‘zone’ where surrealist poetry flows from. In the words of the late blues scholar and surrealist Paul Garon, one can ‘practice’ surrealism by cultivating hypnagogic and hypnopompic states. While you may not be able to capture the real speed of thought in the sense that Rene Menil discussed, you may witness the rapid-fire development of irrational phrases and imagery that clues you in somewhat to the primary processes of the mind. It may be easier to speak into a tape deck rather than write or type; using a pen or keyboard inevitably slows down the flow of words. This is something you have to experience for yourself to appreciate how profound it can be.
Given how much the conscious personality is subject to all sorts of everyday repressions and traumas, this ‘act of unfettering ‘(Franklin Rosemont) suggests a new outlook on life, as it can help to short circuit the electric fences established between the inner and outer worlds. We have only to fully grasp and re-shape the material world in order to transform it into the reality of desire; our mental liberation is bound up with it. Our personal liberation is in reciprocal interplay with the freedom of those around us; we have to break free from the neurotic habits and self-destructive fixations that serve as immobilizing distractions. As Paul Garon wrote, our own hesitations are the enemy; the super-ego which restrains one into polite responses to maintain decorum in the face of a hostile world must be circumvented until it’s no longer holding us back. There are times when we must mobilize sexual and aggressive responses to this world if we are to subvert its constraints. The surrealist experience helps us prepare for the epic battles to come.