A Commonplace Book

Affirmation of the Marvelous, which is also the negation of all that rationalizes misery, is the key to all forms of surrealist research, also known as the "practice of poetry."

For surrealists, poetry is always discovery, risk, revelation, adventure, an activity of the mind, a method of knowledge leading to revolutionary solutions to the fundamental problems of life.

Poetry is therefore the opposite of "literature"--a term which, in surrealist discourse, signifies a benumbing distraction that serves only the needs of repression and conformity.

[Surrealists] have always rejected what they consider to be the militaristic label "avant-garde," which critics like to apply to every cultural novelty.

By boldly identifying themselves with the cause of working-class self-emancipation, the surrealists demonstrated their utter scorn for capitalism's cultural elitism.

They also avoided the trap of "mysticism," another means by which poets are converted into innocuous comforters of the existing order. Surrealism's atheistic and materialist conception of poetry vigorously rejects the consolations of organized religion--that "impoverished magic," as Joyce Mansour called it--whose ideologies it regards as inherently authoritarian and imagination-stifling.

By freeing "the practice of poetry" from the confines of literature, religion, and other forms of idealism--that is, from society's received ideas and other debris of the past--surrealism restored to poetry the prophetic voice that most of those who called themselves poets had long since renounced in favor of artifice, mystification, and other literary vanities. All that surrealists have done in poetry and the arts can be seen as a prophetic warning in regard to what Breton called the "extreme precariousness" of the human condition and at the same time an incitement to do something about it.

In a nutshell, the surrealist argument goes like this: If civilization persists on its disastrous path-denying dreams, degrading language, shackling love, destroying nature, perpetuating racism, glorifying authoritarian institutions (family, church, state, patriarchy, military, the so-called free market), and reducing all that exists to the status of disposable commodities--then surely devastation is in store not only for us but for all life on this planet. Effective ways out of the dilemma, however, are accessible to all, and they are poetry, freedom, love, and revolution.