Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Franklin Rosemont departs


Last week the Surrealist Movement and the world in general lost a dear friend, Franklin Rosemont. Franklin, co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group, facilitator of a more organized Surrealist Movement in the United States (in general terms) IWW activist, Arsenal founder, writer, champion of Ted Joans and Philip Lamantia, friend of the Beats; mentor and supporter of the Portland Surrealist Group and the Saint Louis Surrealist Group, etc, can NOT be summed up in a mere blogpost so I will let his words linger on like sweet wine on a hot sun-soaked day......... : "Surrealism strives to liberate the imagination from the strictures of repression, to restore our latent poetic faculties, to put language in the service of desire and to enable it to formulate ardent images of implacable subversion. There is no 'realistic' escape from the life which offers more than the surrealist seizure of life. Unveiled language does not propose an escape but rather a thoroughgoing transformation of the world."

"Starting from the very depths of what we call the imagination, pure psychic automatism brings to the surface signals of the individual's farthest vision into the self - signals which tend to take on aspects of the future. Surrealism, this invisible ray, was brought into being not only to discover these signals, but to realize the future they call forth. The automatic image becomes a guide to action." --- Franklin Rosemont, excerpts via Arsenal 1970

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