Last night was our annual (mostly) Breton's Birthday celebration of Surrealism. This year, our theme was Surrealist love letters. (Largely because the main event coincided Valentine's Day-- Breton's actual B-Day falls next week.) Mostly it's a chance for some collage artmaking, reading some poems, and a final zine project we've been collecting over a couple weeks and promoting some resources in the library. Because a portion of the event was an open mic, I wrote a new piece culled, collage style, from a discarded book with an essay called "The Reach of Imagination" by Jacob Bronowski. While maybe not a love letter per se, at least not to an obvious lover, it actually turned out reasonably good with a couple killer lines (that one at the end of part one is really nice.).
induction
i. into what seeming deserts the poet is born
wooden as a rain gauge or self-registering machine.
The temperature of bloodheat.
The conditioned reflex. An animal
cannot recall,
behave consistently.
The salmon and the carrier pigeon find their way home
as we cannot. The recollection of absent things
is where the animal falls short,
trying to fix the light in the mind by fixing it in its body.
ii. beautiful papers on the random movement of atoms
an imaginary experiment:
suppose, said Galileo, you drop two unequal balls from
the tower at the same time. The drag or brake.
Your assumption, the contradiction.
The heavier ball falls more slowly,
falling at the same rate when they are tied together.
Speeded up, slowed down.
iii. the price we pay for living a thousand lives
A child begins to play games with things that stand for other things.
All chess players sadly recall the combinations
they planned and which never came to be be played.
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*the title of this post is taken from Breton's poem, "Free Union"
