How to Write Surrealist Poetry

Surrealist poetry underlies much of the cherished painting, sculpture, film and literature of contemporary times. From the spooky, writhing paintings of Salvador Dali to the bizarre interlude scenes of films like "The Big Lebowski," surrealist poetry has given rise to mountains of creativity.

Difficulty:

Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Start doing automatic writing. The most central technique in surrealist poetry and in the surrealist movement in general, is automatic writing. Sit down with a pen and paper (or your word processing program) and start writing whatever pops into your head. Write anything and everything without being afraid or concerned about structure or content.

2. Use surrealist poetry games. One of the important techniques to come out of the surrealist poetry movement is a writing game called "The Exquisite Corpse." In this game, one member of a group of poets write a line or phrase of poetry. Without seeing the line, another group member writes the following line, and this continues until the group feels the poem is done. The result is usually a highly surrealistic piece of poetry.

3. Randomize the poetry. To continue in the direction of unordered words and phrases, place a few dozen words written on scraps of paper into a hat. Pull the words out of the hat in order to assemble the poem. Make adjustments to the resulting collection of words so that it takes the form of a flowing poem, even if the content is unintelligible.

4. Go to another level of consciousness. After practicing randomization techniques and automatic writing, you should try get to another level of surrealist poetry. Since the surrealist movement was an attempt to find "higher" level of reality, try meditating for half an hour before attempting to write. Let your mind wander and relax so that when you begin to write the poetry comes from a deeper level of consciousness.