"POEM" - an excerpt from the "Manifesto of Surrealism" by Andre Breton

This excerpt I'm sharing with you was taken from a section of Andre Breton's first Manifesto of Surrealism, and is a particular favorite in that it has inspired yours truly to drop all creative pretenses, etiquettes and rules in favor of random creativity from a seemingly controlled source (edited newspaper copy/headlines), and in effect "unediting" them into a new reality or a surreality -- which is how I choose to define surrealism (can't be defined so there).

What lurks between the lines is a sense of meaning, a message - a freedom. Enjoy:

"Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations. The pieces of paper that Picasso and Braque insert into their work have the same value as the introduction of a platitude into a literary analysis of the most rigorous sort. It is even permissible to entitle POEM what we get from the most random assemblage possible (observe, if you will, the syntax) of headlines and scraps of headlines cut out of the newspapers:

POEM

A burst of laughter

of sapphire in the island of Ceylon

The most beautiful straws

HAVE A FADED COLOR

UNDER THE LOCKS

on an isolated farm

FROM DAY TO DAY

the pleasant

grows worse

coffee

preaches for its saint

THE DAILY ARTISAN OF YOUR BEAUTY

M^ADAM,

a pair

of silk stockings

is not

A leap into space

A STAG

Love above all

Everything could be worked out so well

PARIS IS A BIG VILLAGE

Watch out for

the fire that covers

THE PRAYER

of fair weather

Know that

The ultraviolet rays

have finished their task

short and sweet

THE FIRST WHITE PAPER

OF CHANCE

Red will be

The wandering singer

WHERE IS HE?

in memory

in his house

AT THE SUITORS’ BALL

I do

as I dance

What people did, what they’re going to do"

POEM OF THE DAY "Less Time" by Andre Breton

Well, here you are.  Hangin out recently with eNothing, you've been on an enjoyable little cruise, this poetic journey through Whitman, Stevens, Poe, etc. and so on .  You've been with eNothing for a long time and you've usually enjoyed some good material, perhaps even a different perspective on some of the most traditional material.

You've been safe.  You've shared this material with others (thank you).

If you've been with eNothing all along, welcome back.  This is where we're from.  It's not safe here.  This is impressionism, surrealism.

This is where my mind resides.  As some of my friends have told me - "your mind is a dangerous place for me to be".  Well okay.  As you'll see in our next few posts, it may be "dangerous".  But it's a lot of fun...

And so here, from the founder of "surrealism" -- is "Less Time" by Andre Breton.  His poetry, as that from the likes of Paul Eluard and others, is to poetry what someone like Dali is to painting.

Follow eNothing for more surrealism (art and poetry) over the coming days.

Less Time  

by Andre Breton

Less time than it takes to say it, less tears than it takes to die; I've taken account of everything,
there you have it. I've made a census of the stones, they are as numerous as my fingers and some
others; I've distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all were willing to accept them. I've
kept company with music for a second only and now I no longer know what to think of suicide, for
if I ever want to part from myself, the exit is on this side and, I add mischievously, the entrance, the
re-entrance is on the other. You see what you still have to do. Hours, grief, I don't keep a
reasonable account of them; I'm alone, I look out of the window; there is no passerby, or rather no
one passes (underline passes). You don't know this man? It's Mr. Same. May I introduce Madam
Madam? And their children. Then I turn back on my steps, my steps turn back too, but I don't
know exactly what they turn back on. I consult a schedule; the names of the towns have been
replaced by the names of people who have been quite close to me. Shall I go to A, return to B,
change at X? Yes, of course I'll change at X. Provided I don't miss the connection with boredom!
There we are: boredom, beautiful parallels, ah! how beautiful the parallels are under God's
perpendicular. 

-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "Always for the First Time" by Andre Breton

Always For The First Time   

by Andre Breton

Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It's a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the
forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time 

 -

Top 100 or so Poems -- POEM OF THE DAY -- "Freedom of Love" by Andre Breton

12/8/2011

An anthology of the "Top 100 or so" works of poetry should include some work from the Surrealist Movement, and who better to represent the poetry of "Surrealism" - the major French movement of the 20th century - than the "founder" of the Surrealist Movement (and author of the Surrealist Manifesto) -- Andre Breton himself. The self-imposed Leader of the movement which included such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and fellow poet Paul Eluard - provides us with several poems to choose from.

We've narrowed it down to two:

• Always for the First Time

• Freedom of Love
  

Always for the First Time might be the slightly more famous of the two poems; but in considering the context of this "Twitter Broadcast" - a heavy readership amongst Smartphone users, "Freedom of Love" takes you a bit deeper into the Surrealistic pillow - in a more comfortable manner.

An unusual presentation of the outpourings of the heart, and life, and love of his wife.

Enjoy.

Freedom of Love

By Andre Breton

(Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)


My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire




-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "Five Ways to Kill a Man" by Surrealist Andre Breton

Andre Breton is widely considered to be the principal founder of the
surrealist movement.  His interesting poems are very symbolic and abstract
in a fashion not unlike his contemporary artists who went on to make
surrealism the influential and keystone movement that it was.

Five Ways to Kill a Man is one of his self explanatory poems, really,
taken with an understanding that it was written after he was called up
to participate in WWI...

Enjoy this brilliant man.  Read this poem.  Look at his picture.  How many
of you - contemporary as you are - how many of you can relate to Andre
Breton?  Time passes but we are all connected.

Five Ways To Kill A Man

by Andre Breton


There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.

You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

-