Sherry Chandler

Simone Weil, as quoted by Csezlaw Milosz in “The Lesson of Biology” from The Witness of Poetry (Harvard, 1983):

Dadaism, surrealism, are extreme cases. They expressed the frenzy of total license, the frenzy which takes hold of the mind when, rejecting all consideration of value, it plunges into the immediate. Good is a pole that by necessity attracts the human mind, not only in action but in every effort, including the effort of pure intelligence. The surrealists set up a model of non-oriented thought; they chose for a supreme value a total absence of value. License has always entranced men and that is why, throughout history, cities have been sacked. But the sacking of cities has not always had its equivalent in literature. Surrealism is such an equivalent. (p.55)

Charles Bernstein in “Artifice of Absorption” in A Poetics (Harvard, 1992):

Think here
again
of the surrealist project
in which the aim was to mine more deeply
into the unconscious & the dream
state than normally possible with conventional
writing practices. The
odd juxtapositions & strange syntax
of surrealist poetry was not an attempt to creatively use
inattention; on the contrary, Breton
rejected those poets whom he felt were pursuing
such Dadaist or constructivist programs. Surrealism
as expounded by Breton, is the most radically
absorptive poetry imaginable; its
quest is not to foreground artifice but to reveal
“surreality”.

These two passages bemuse and amuse me, not because they contradict one another but because they don’t even seem to be talking about the same thing.

Only Dadaism is out on both counts.