>This is becoming important now as I've noticed a shift - more young poets and artists are picking up on surrealism as a positive source after years of it being portrayed as passe or just a convenient poetic tool.
My impression is that the most common critical trope around surrealism - both from conservative and radicals - has tended to be that it's stupid: that (unlike whatever the writer considers to be proper serious poems) it represents an intrinsic dumbing down of the potentialities of poetry. (Obviously I don't agree with that.)
There's definitely interest in a re-invented surrealism in various places. The Surrealist Group of Stockholm were an important collective a few years back. In different ways the poetry around Flarf and the Gurlesque and the Montevidayo discussion blog have all felt a strong pull towards surrealism. A couple of years back, the description "soft surrealism" (first used by Silliman and others to refer pejoratively to formulaic wackiness in post-Simic mainstream writing) was appropriated as a kind of positive. I think that was Goransson and McSweeney, though I don't remember the details of the argument.
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