All summer I’ve been reading Deep Image poetry and about Deep Image poetry. I’ve focused my concentrations on Robert Bly, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Robert Kelly, and Jerome Rothenberg. I also read Louis Simpson, who is a fine poet, but in the end, is not a Deep Image poet. I excluded many other fine Deep Image poets as I needed to contain my study, at least in the short-term. I decided to study this poetry and these poets because I wanted to come to an understanding with them and with Deep Image poetry. Over the last 20 or so years, I’ve gone back and forth on them – for instance: Bly is okay, Bly sucks, Bly is awesome, Bly has a tin ear, Bly’s music is tonal, Bly is innovative, Bly is boring, etc.. The older I get the more I like Deep Image poetry, but still I have some concerns: is the language hard enough? is the music interesting enough? is there music? why are there so many stock words like, “snow,” “teeth,” “shadow,” etc.? why the heavy use of “of,” “of the,” and preposition+”the,” etc?
Each of these poets has a different take on Deep Image poetry, especially those poets in the Bly Deep-Image camp and the poets in the Kelly/Rothenberg Deep-Image camp. One thing that is true of all them is that Deep Image has roots in the Surreal. Deep Image poetry, like Surrealism, tries to include the irrational, the unreasonable, and the unconscious in order to create a poem that speaks to the whole of a person, instead of, for instance, just the conscious, rational side of the person. Surrealism also tries to transform what language can do and/or should do, as does Language Poetry but in a different way.
This leads me to the point of what I want to talk about here. The last few days I’ve been writing in a manner or approach that is new to me, though I’m sure others have tried the same approach. (I hope that by writing about it I don’t jinx myself out of continuing this approach.) What I’ve been doing is trying automatic writing (a writing strategy of the Surrealists where, essentially, the person just writes without thinking or stopping to correct a typo or correcting anything) while at the same time trying to avoid meaning making. Avoiding meaning making is the challenge. It’s more than just putting random words together. It’s putting random words together so that someone can’t make sense of them, which is difficult because the human mind likes to make meanings, associations, narratives, etc., in order to understand and/or interpret. So I tried to write so that another person couldn’t impose a meaning, structure, narrative, associations, etc. on top of the poem. That’s what I tried in the first draft. I aimed for meaninglessness. I aimed to put out words that no longer had the linguistic, cultural, and economic impositions of meanings.
I, however, am a meaning making person. So after the first draft, which looks like something translated from another language through Google’s translator but even less sensical, I begin my own translation. I translate what I have into something that makes sense for the reader and myself. I try to create a narrative or associations or sensible stanzas of sentences. However, since the origin of the poems is from such an irrational and shaky area, the sentences end up disoriented or disorienting, which is the ideal.
In the end, the poem escapes the predetermined and expected order of perception and language. The poem makes new meanings, new perceptions, and new syntactical arrangements that don’t evade the conscious mind or the unconscious mind – the poem speaks to both. The poem shakes the reader out of the ordinary, I hope/think. The poem because of how it is written and how the final draft appears also speaks to the whole of the person.
This new approach is what I call Surreal LangPo. (I can’t find evidence of this term being used before, so I hope I’m the first.)
One more guideline/rule: the poet must avoid the Surrealist genitive “of.” That is, try to avoid creating possessive constructions that use “of.”
I hope I’ve provided enough guidance to help you approach perceiving, language, and writing poems in a new way. I’d like to give examples, but I’m reluctant. If I put the poems here, then I might influence you too much. I think these general guidelines will allow you to discover a more personal approach to Surreal LangPo.//
The Line Break 
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