Jean Bonnin

Surrealist and Dadaist Poetry: An Anthology Jean Bonnin

Surrealism and Dadaism have been two of the most influential

and powerful internationalist movements of the twentieth century.

Revolution, absurdism, and humour fused together to create these

forces of untamed creativity. Forces that rejected the rational

conscious mind in favour of dream, the subconscious,

subversion, love, and hidden desire.

Within these pages the reader will find the poems

of both the dominant and the less well-known protagonists

of Dadaism and Surrealism past and present, as well as

some poems by those who have been closely linked to both movements...




Dada came into its own in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich,

where unstructured live performance, poetry, and music were

combined to create a subversive cultural break from the

stifling and destructive mores of the time...

Surrealism took up the baton and developed into

not only the subversive influence that its predecessor had been,

but in addition it wished to, as André Breton put it:

"resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality

into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality.




No other artistic and cultural movements have been as obdurate

in their desire to change the world and to change reality -

both from without and from within... And their belief

in poetry, love, revolt, subversion, juxtaposition, and dream

can be seen to be coursing through the veins of

the poems that have been chosen

for this anthology.




In case it is ever forgotten, this collection reminds us

of the importance of poetry in the

struggle to carve out a more harmonious,

radical and egalitarian future.