All texts copyright Richard Shillitoe
poetry:
surrealist poetry
Colquhoun experimented with automatic writing throughout her life and
also took part in surrealist group games in which collective poetic invention
took the place of individual inspiration. The disquieting, and often
humorous, effect of these word games lies partly in the contrast between
the strict formal structure of the exchange and its apparently arbitrary
content. In a subversion of language, form and content pull in different
directions.
One example of the genre is the chain poem. The chain poem is one in
which one participant writes a line, folds the paper to conceal it from view
and passes it to a second player who does the same before passing it to a
third. A broad structure such as ‘question and answer’ or ‘if and then’ may be agreed beforehand. Based on
the familiar party game, it is another surrealist activity for exploring the unconscious. The results are often
banal, sometimes humorous and frequently lascivious because the apparently random content is likely to be
selected for its anticipated effect upon one’s playing partners.
Some chain poems were published in the surrealist periodical TRANSFORMAcTION in 1973 although they had
been written much earlier. Here is one example:
He:
If my love could be written down
She: Then the waterfalls would all turn black.
If one turned around three times
He:
Then I would fuck you all day long.
If my tongue could reach your womb through your mouth
She: Then the toads would spit fire and all the gates would creak.
If I went on a long sea-trip
He:
Then even apple-trees would be monogamous.
Colquhoun and del Renzio produced a chain poem on their wedding day. The other participants were their
witnesses, Olive Bellamy and Conroy Maddox, and friends Robert and Lilian Melville. Maddox offered a
typically anti-clerical contribution:
A wax model with stale bread under her eyelids
And the crevice of her armpits sodden with leaves
Chased a tonsured priest in his underwear
Through the corridors of my mind
Never one to let truth get in the way of a good anecdote, Maddox put about the story that to counter del
Renzio’s impressive list of Russian names, he falsely signed the register ‘Conroy Griffin Boost Maddox’,
invalidating the legality of the marriage by doing so. (1) Inspection of the marriage register, however, dispels
the myth. Maddox did, in fact, sign his lines in the chain poem ‘Conroy Griffon-Boost-Maddox’, showing that
there is some truth in the story, but it was hardly the subversive act of the anecdote.
Colquhoun regarded the “found-object poem” as an example of automatism, writing:
surely such objects are found through the exercise of the automatic faculty? (I have found poems
in a Gaelic Grammar and in entomological lists.)
The Gaelic grammar produced the unpublished Poems of He and She. The title refers to the gender of
masculine and feminine nouns (with Colquhoun gender is never far away). The poems include the following
useful phrases:
I value that greatly
I desire it
I remember him
he owes me a shilling
The entomological list produced Hypnagogic Interior, published in Osmazone, of which the following is an
excerpt:
Silvery arches
Small angle shades
Scarce burnished brass
Small argent-and-sable
Notes
1. “Griffon-boost” comes from the Rolls Royce engine intended for installation in the Spitfire fighter plane.
The story was repeated by Remy, M. “Surrealism in Britain”. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, p. 353.