Surrealism & Human Misery

The 2013 Larry Levis Reading Prize was awarded to Michael McGriff for his poetry collection Home Burial. I was fortunate to have attended the September event where McGriff's writing was brought to life, read aloud by its author.
(A transcript and complete audio recording of the evening is available here.)

In addition to the poetry I was also struck by an exceptional portion of David Wojahn's opening remarks. I believe this haunting excerpt belongs among the other explorations found in this blog.

• Almost a hundred years ago now the word surrealism was coined. And when the surrealist artists and poets began issuing their various manifestos, readers were told that the methodology of surrealism, its fervent belief in dreams and chance and paradox and serendipity and those liminal states between waking and dreaming, would lead people to a state of perfect freedom, to a kind of bliss. Breton defines surrealism as the road to the absolute.
  
  The point of the movement was to find another world.
  
  The trouble is you have to find that other world in this one, and this is a world that cares nothing for perfect freedom and is interested in bliss only if it can be dispensed via a consumer product, ideally an expensive one, whether legal or illegal. So an artistic movement that began as a deeply hopeful, embracing one became instead something different. Surreal is now one of those can't words…that pervade our vocabulary because they seem to speak not of human potential, but of human misery, of the contradictions and injustice that bewilder and enslave us.