Dear Friends! it is about to be February as I write…
Welcome, again, to the idea of surrealism(s) as we in our reading group, however we are constituting ourselves, are thinking of meaning the term in these coming five weeks, which mean to be about looking “surrealistically” at whatever we read and much of what we talk about zoomingly. We shall probably reserve the final week’s gathering for whatever comes up, but these are the texts I have thought of to carry on with. I wanted to call your attention (and my own) to Octavio Paz writing on poetry, just for a brief introduction, then a look at Paris through “Paris,” that amazingly important and sometimes (certainly by yours truly) overlooked epic poem of 1919 (published in 1920 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. And whatever whoever might like to say about the two prose poems I sent you (or Maddie sent you)by Ben Lerner and by Lydia Davis, and how they might or might not seem surrealistic to you. As for what we (“we”)are meaning now by that term, we could have a blow of the mind in that direction.
Thinking over what categorically named “surrealist” texts leap to my own mind at present, I would include (and am asking Sandra, who is our assistant this semester, to be sure they are on zoom reserve, however that works) the following, since we have them in our own library:
Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (the Paris peasant), either translation fine
André Breton’s Nadja which you might reread in the present edition and I think I have somewhere my writeup of the newish publication of the original as found recently by Gallimard.. not a certainty but a hope
Robert Desnos, no argument here, the great poet of surrealism, some collection, probably A la mystérieuse (To the Mysterious One) of 1926
Antonin Artaud “Van Gogh: the Man Suicided by Society”- Susan Sontag did a collection of Artaud with FSG and there is an excerpt in my Surrealist Painters and Poets in our own library at the GC.
At some point, Benjamin Péret’s Le Grand Jeu (the Great Game) might make its way in, and if we don’t have it in the library we should, from Black Widow Books, who are bringing out this year our Beginnings: Early Prose POems from all Over with translations by both Marianna Rosen and Chris Campanioni…(edited by Michel Delville and myself)
So, read anything you feel like and mention anything you’d like us all to read together, and mention whatever you are working on when we aren’t together!
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m.a.c.
Mary Ann Caws
