CONTEMPORARY SURREALIST AND MAGICAL REALIST POETRY: AN INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY (Lamar University Literary Press, 2022)

I have some excerpts from my ongoing long poem “Disorientations” in Jonas Zdanys’s recent anthology Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry, which is an attempt to move our conceptions of lyric away from what Zdanys, in his introduction “The Lyric Imagination,” calls “self-absorption in the guise of epiphany” (16) and “self-indulgent stenography” (17) to “unusual and newly-defined angles of reflection” that is enabled by the surrealist lyric (17). It is odd, then, that surrealism figures very little in accounts of modern lyric poetry or theorizations of lyric. Indeed, surrealism is sometimes seen as lyric’s other. According to Alicia Ostriker, “In contrast to tragic and lyric modes, which persuade us that their visionary worlds are deeply true, and must be accepted, surrealism persuades us that its world is arbitrary and questionable” (qtd. in Gillian White, Lyric Shame 127).

~ by Michael Leong on February 25, 2023.