Uut (n.):
the chance meeting of a galleon and a caribou on the dissecting table of America
an infectious strain of contemporary American surrealism
a practitioner of Uut poetics
a cloven-hoofed quadruped with nautical antlers
What is Uut?
Uut is a card in the surrealist tarot deck of Ellis Nadler.
Uut is the chance meeting of a Spanish galleon and a caribou on the dissecting table of North America.
Uut is the owl’s warning call at midnight.
Uut is the guttural declaration of existence, the primordial, bastard sibling of the id.
Uut is the stupefied first syllable of the name of the capitalist superpower that has become a surrealist nightmare, a narcissistic Mobius strip.
Uut is the liberating playground of dream-reality.
Uut is the indistinct zone between external and internal that becomes apparent when these realities are set against one another or isolated from each other, or when one or the other is forgotten, trampled on, squelched, oppressed or shaved.
Uut is a way of life that aspires to sainthood, a holy foolishness.
Uut depicts, typographically, the human condition, and is capable of containing the paradox of man as animal and spiritual pilgrim.
Uut is poetry written from the whole consciousness.
This site is a blog newsletter with an interest in surreal poetry in its broadest sense. This site will consist of critical readings of poems, reviews, draft of my poems, recipes for writing surreal poems of your own, and occasional wanderings into the theoretical and speculative. All of these forms of writing are conceived as direct or indirect explorations of surrealist poetics and aim to elucidate in some sense the elusive but irresistible ideological-aesthetic of our times.
Surrealism migrated to the US during and after WWII and has become reinvented and reworked to accommodate the interests and idioms of a variety of American poetic traditions. These traditions include, for instance, the Beats, the Deep Image poets, the New York poets and some of the Language poets, but it extends beyond these schools and has become inculcated into the mainstream and can be detected in the soft verses of the best selling poets and mill-churned products of MFA students. It thrives in virile new forms in the experimental small presses. It is therefore necessary, given the interests of this site, to cast a wide net in order to understand the complexity and scope of surrealism in contemporary poetry.
Become an Uut
Join the fun by submitting original poetry in the surrealist tradition. If you make surrealist collages, submit those too! See submission guidelines.
Brooks Lampe teaches literature at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. He is the creator and editor of Uut Poetry (Tumblr) and the author of The Planet of Left Hands.
Credits
“Uut” by Ellis Nadler (About page). Ellis Nadler’s “Uut” to be an apt metaphor of surrealism’s violent juxtaposition and its transformation of indigenous elements into marvelous and visionary creations. I thus propose this word as the moniker for American poetry that creatively extends the surrealist poetic tradition into the 21st century. For more on surrealist poetry, please refer to the Sources page.
“Alchemy Book” by rali setiadi from the Noun Project (Distillery section) (CC BY 3.0)
