Always the Surrealists Hit Hardest

Spring is meant for the surrealists

It’s Spring in the northern hemisphere and sometimes Spring seems a surrealist’s dream: mud, storms, multicolor and transient blooms bursting out from surprising locations, squirrels defying dogs, deer defying urban and suburban sprawl. It seems only logical to start off National Poetry Month with a poem inspired by surrealist art.

“Always the Surrealists Hit Hardest” is inspired by a 1953 Leonora Carrington painting, And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur! You can view the painting on display in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art and in their online collection at this link.

People have had a lot to say about this painting, and this artist. Some additional links can be found below. But I am of two minds about knowing too much about an artist when viewing their art. Yes, it can be nice to know some of the background that may have inspired the art or something about the artist’s approach to the subject. On the other hand, in the end, all art must stand alone. The artist is not standing next to us while we view their work. The poet cannot be on hand to answer every question about a poem. What you take away from the art may not be what the artist intended, not even in part. And the same is true for poetry.

So, enough said, here’s the poem:

Always The Surrealist Hits Hardest

--After And Then We Saw the Daughter of
the Minotaur! by Leonora Carrington, 1953

and then we saw her gowned in red silk
her too-slim whippets curled on the floor
her bovine features sleek and winsome
and she read our futures in soap bubbles
and told us some of that coming news
while her mother watched through a veil
silently urging us forward toward tomorrow
and we forgot to fear the over-large world
and the broken dryad danced in the hallway
mourning the column of her lost oak

The best thing about surrealism in art

is its inexplicability combined with deeply evocative imagery. You may describe it but not explain it. It sticks with you, and you can’t completely say why. It speaks and you hear, and yet there were no words.

Here are a couple more links if you’d like to read a bit more about Leonora Carrington:

The Surrealist, Feminist Magic of Leonora Carrington gives some background on Leonora Carrington’s life and art in a 2019 Cultured online article.

This is another 2019 article, this one from artsy.net: Leonora Carrington Bought a Wild, Feminist Intensity to Surrealist Painting

The image accompanying this post is not from Carrington’s painting. I created it using Midjourney to evoke one of the minotaurs and the dryad of the poem.