Hysterical Surrealism
byOctavio Paz knew something when he said poets were parachuting over the ‘post-babelic’ ruins somewhere off the main highway – or maybe that was the Chilean Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. Negritude, existentialism, lettrisme, Dada, Oulipo, Fluxus, situationism, magical realism, feminism, post-colonialism are all creation stories and etiologies, defeating volcanos and assigning new destinies, eating new Gods. It’s a poetry Stewart Home would recognize as living now, dying later.