The Best of Science Fiction 12

In America, as in England, there is a growing entente between s-f and poetry — both 'literary' and 'pop'. Dick Allen, who teaches at the University of Ohio and edits the Mad River Review, published a forceful article in Writers' Digest last year on the uses and usages of surrealist imagery in contemporary poetry and folkrock:

... Surrealistic satire is much more than simple pot-dreams and fantasy ... Traditional satire — like that of Pope — presupposes reason and an ordered universe. [Whatever] deviates from order and reason can be criticised. Surrealistic satire, conversely, presupposes a ... universe full of self-contradictions ... Sharing this kind of sensibility, the folkrock artist tells the older member of his society they have turned out the whole for the parts (i.e. Eliot's 'The Wasteland') and must again see with the eyes of a child before they can vision with the eyes of a man ... The modes of thought in Alice's Wonderland cannot be judged with words like 'selfish' and 'reason' The new thing here is that it is not just the poets who understand this — society has finally begun to catch up with them. ...

The weird imagery of folk rock is communicating the new modes of apprehension ... The modern world comes at us in all directions, on all sorts of sound waves. The lyrics reflect the absurdity of a television culture which finds nothing strange in watching a deodourant commercial interrupt a bloody filmclip from Vietnam ... It is the natural aftermath, the popularisation, of a sensibility which helped produce Waiting for Godot, Dr. Strangelove, Cat's Cradle and Catch-22.