
“[Anne-Marie] Turza shows dramatic flair for summoning our attention, that of a town crier or carnival barker who was handed a surprise announcement at the last possible minute, and now must sell its premise before a skeptical gathered audience with all the bravado she can muster.”
Surrealism is not difficult to understand. One of the reasons for that is inherent, the other historical. Inherent: We all have dreams and chances are they are absurd, disturbing, and disjointed. We accept this sleeping reality, as we are all post-Freudians, and he gave us a convenient set of explanations, boiling down to the fact that we are working out unconscious, unresolved issues as we sleep. Yet we tend to forget those dreams quickly (unless we tell them to our mate or our co-workers) and go about our day, generally accepting that even the strangest and most violent chains of imagery in our dormant minds have their own quasi-independent, private logic, one we could potentially puzzle over forever without necessarily getting to the bottom of them. Thus, we let them go and let odd new dreams take their place. Thus pass our lives.
The second reason, as said, is historical. Surrealism, which began as an outgrowth of Dadaist pranks, grew into a deeper, more earnest study of the dreamlike aspects of reality, and artists such as Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso created visual representations of liminal waking states of consciousness, often with obliquely suggestive erotic content. David Lynch’s quirky 1977 film Eraserhead stands as an apotheosis of surrealism in cinema, leaving us in the autoerotic, anxious murk of human intention, first announced in Luis Buñuel’s 1929 short film Un chien andalou, with its famous eyeball split by a razor blade. At the same time, beginning at least as early as 1928 with Felix the Cat, cartoons got into the game, channeling that original Dadaist party spirit, reminding people not to get too wrapped up in abstruse intellectualizing. If it’s not fun, don’t do it. If it is, run riot.
In this way, surrealism has, over the span of a century, become one of the most powerful and popular of all artistic movements, able to satisfy both lovers of esoteric high art and fanboys and fangirls of popular fare. It can be disturbing or squeaky clean. Everybody may not actually love Raymond (Queneau), but they all love surrealism in one shape or another—in poetry, prose, visual art, cinema. Warner Brothers would not have been the same studio without it, nor Disney, which has relied heavily on surrealist tropes and visual gags throughout its long existence. The Cartoon Network would not have lasted a year without rampant surrealist animation because children (and often the parents watching alongside them) quickly learn to embrace spirited illogic in an alternate world where nobody actually gets hurt.
This proliferation created its own sets of problems. Over-saturation in any medium, especially one bridging haute and popular art simultaneously, can become wearing, safe, even dull, and, moreover, a set of tropes accrues, ones that no longer claim perceptual attention as they once did. The overuse of the word “surreal” in recent decades, to describe anything slightly weird, is a testament to surrealism fatigue, the erosion of its once-virgin beach, and the relative difficulty of its efficacy to hold the mind, heart, and senses in any medium at any deeper level beyond mere diversion. It is an age-old problem of art, trying to “épater les bourgeois” the way Arthur Rimbaud once did.
That being the case, why go there? To do so now, to renew the tradition today, with both heft and pizzazz, requires both a startling imagination and an exacting, almost scientific mind for esoteric aspects of existence, ones that yearn to be explored in at least a half-serious manner. Fortunately for we devotees of modern verse, Canadian poet Anne-Marie Turza is in replete possession of precisely those two qualities in her book of poetry Fugue With Bedbug, from Anansi Press.
In an interview at the Victoria Festival of Authors, Turza is explicit about the linkage to surrealism in speaking of the volume’s longest poetic sequence, which has previously been published as a chapbook.
“Slip Minute is very much about disarranging linear time. I wanted a bigger project where I could work out some ideas I have about the purpose of life, an anti-narrative, non-rational, fantastic purpose made out of language at its most musical, where the signposts are surreal images. An alternative to a fact-based obituary, in a sense.”
Surreal images as signposts comprise a rational, methodical approach to creating a non-rational anti-narrative. This seeming paradox allows the reader to follow the pulses of imagery along a logical (or pseudo-) route. We remain in its flow rather than being pushed toward a hasty conclusion. We may “dwell poetically,” in the sense that Heidegger means it, accommodating ourselves to the given, if unfamiliar, surroundings, becoming at home there without simply taking it for granted. This approach is only a further, specialized heightening of the innate gravitation of poetry at large toward multiplicity, indirection, polyvalence, and indeterminacy.
- Inside the slip minute are many kinds of darkness,
occurring all at once.
This is true, though almost all the words are wrong—
Turza often presents each poem in the manner of a scientific treatise in which we are asked to consider darkness as simultaneous and multiple, as if she were explaining a set of facts quite straightforward, using colons, lists with bullet points, numbers and letters, phrases such as “in fact,” technical language (retrograph, atoms of vapor-water), or the pronoun “we,” as if to include us in the logical proposition, tacitly eliciting our agreement that whatever follows has then been proven by mutual consent.
we have viewed footage from variable sleep,
we scramble up a hill to our interior bodies,
we are in feelings dense as fresh mushrooms,
we have looked as strangers do, like a closed hospital.
What is “variable sleep”? How may or must we climb up to our own “interior body”? As this poem unfolds, one begins to understand her desire to examine the elasticity or fluidity of time, while situating us within familiar, if esoteric states of consciousness, “feelings dense as mushrooms,” or else the defamiliarized sensation of experiencing ourselves like strangers within our own bodies, looking at ourselves as if we were a separate being.
- b) But it is singular, the slip minute.
Or, does time have many retrographs.
Many slip minutes, one and one and yet
a separate other, wrackable as arguments,
wherein solid people move
parts of our mutable faces,
and plants are mysterious, yes
Her poems summon the kind of precise logic required to analyze esoteric aspects of mathematics, such as fractals, necessary to map an eroded coastline, a snowflake, or crystal growth. We need formulae to break down the elusive geometries of the visible world in their invisible aspect. What prickles us in her poems is that they seem to make perfect sense, yet they feel elusive. That profitable discomfort zone will feel familiar to anyone who has grappled with calculus.
On other pages, as in an ekphrastic poem, “Seated Figure with Snail Shell Head: Oil on Canvas, c. 2nd Millennium,” Turza playfully offers a careful yet utterly fanciful barrage of imagery—offbeat yet always precise—in order to present a ridiculous situation in an utterly pseudo-serious manner.
We wore, it’s thought, such luncheon shirts
in the Cenozoic era. Held fast at the throat
with woven collars, alike to certain
vegetables now extinct, such as cauliflower,
heady and with kindred decorative leaves.
“It’s thought”! As if the great minds of the age had conferred on this possible fact before confirming its likelihood. This explanation of the painting could be a museum placard or the discourse of a docent (the ones we trust blindly to give us the truth), in either case straight-faced as it strives to connect us to the surreal image of a well-dressed snail wearing a “luncheon shirt,” the discourse spoken from a future in which cauliflower improbably is now “extinct.” The deadpan tone, or in other cases the tonal ambiguity, allows Turza to set up different kinds of speculative premises in different poems. Often, they feel like the beginning of a logical proof. The poet is never obviously ironic. Her speakers never let on that they are anything but sincere—and well they may be. Her poetry expresses certainty about uncertainty, asking us to dwell in the absurd, the unfamiliar, and that which must be thought about persistently precisely because it has, in the end, no provable thesis.
Turza shows dramatic flair for summoning our attention, that of a town crier or carnival barker who was handed a surprise announcement at the last possible minute, and now must sell its premise before a skeptical gathered audience with all the bravado she can muster.
Whereas,
THE SMALL PARTICLES CAN MAKE A HARE
OUT OF CHEMICAL BUNTING
O, CO2. And other corners
carbon turns to turn into plus
or minus something. Is that hare,
in a car park of energy bonds,
a particular so? Hares do not bear
their young underground (needs citation). 1
Like hare I’m for nests and depressions,
without peer review or a sound
alchemical basis. Where’s
hare? Is that hare now?
Now the town crier of the title, as so often in Turza’s poems, has suddenly become a possibly amateur scientist-philosopher, driven by an inner need for solving marginal phenomena, a process which bears an oblique relation to her personal well being. “Like hare I’m for nests and depressions” requires the speaker to take a position for or against, and, naturally, this seemingly random fact needs both citation and a peer review. In Turza’s cockeyed universe, where objects seem to appear at random, they nevertheless must be verified. But, naturally, that hare cannot be located, for in the end, Fugue With Bedbug asks that we dwell in the mystery—no matter that teams of willing scientists stand at the ready to eliminate all doubt.
One of the many refreshing aspects of this kinetic collection is that to the extent it does employ surrealist techniques (only one of many techniques in the poet’s arsenal), they redeem that spiky movement from becoming overly familiar, thus predictable, or downright silly. Turza keeps us on the point of absurdity to bring us into a genuine spirit of inquiry regarding the nature of time, the natural world, and states of human consciousness that are hard to define, no matter they have been explored for decades, nay centuries, by philosophers, scientists—and yes—poets. A comedienne of sincere intent, she may be the only poet going who, when she titles a poem “We Ate Pickles Together, Says a Dead Man,” she tempts us to read on for the truth that resides in her immaculately wayward verses.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.