A series of personal and historical encounters with surrealism from one of its foremost practitioners in the United States.
"Penelope Rosemont has given us, better than anyone else in the English language, a marvelous, meticulous exploration of the surrealist experience, in all its infinite variety."—Gerome Kamrowski, American Surrealist Painter
One of the hallmarks of Surrealism is the encounter, often by chance, with a key person, place, or object through a trajectory no one could have predicted. Penelope Rosemont draws on a lifetime of such experiences in her collection of essays, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. From her youthful forays as a radical student in Chicago to her pivotal meeting with André Breton and the Surrealist Movement in Paris, Rosemont—one of the movement's leading exponents in the United States—documents her unending search for the Marvelous.
Surrealism finds her rubbing shoulders with some of the movement's most important visual artists, such as Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Mimi Parent, and Toyen; discussing politics and spectacle with Guy Debord; and crossing paths with poet Ted Joans and outsider artist Lee Godie. The book also includes scholarly investigations into American radicals like George Francis Train and Mary MacLane, the myth of the Golden Goose, and Dada precursor Emmy Hennings.
Praise for Surrealism:
"Rosemont is not delivering dry abstractions, as so many academic 'specialists,' but telling us about warm and exciting human encounters, illuminated by the subversive spirit of Permanent Enchantment."—Michael Löwy, author of Ecosocialism
"This compelling and well-drawn book lets us see the adventures, inspirations, and relationships that have shaped Penelope Rosemont's art and rebellion."—David Roediger, author of Class, Race, and Marxism
"The broad sampling of essays included here offer a compelling entry point for curious readers and an essential compendium for surrealist practitioners."—Abigail Susik, professor of art history, Willamette University
"Rosemont's welcome memoir has a double virtue, as testament to the enduring radiance of Surrealism, and as a memento to the Sixties, revealing a sweetly beating wonderment at the heart of that absurdly maligned decade."—Jed Rasula, author of Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century
"Artist, historian, and social activist, Rosemont writes from the inside out. Like a rare, hybrid flower growing out of the earth, she complicates, expands, and opens the strange and beautiful meadow where Surrealism continues to live and thrive.”—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk
"In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Penelope Rosemont, long a keeper of surrealism's revolutionary flame, shows how a penetrating look into the past can liberate the future."—Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter
"Rosemont recreates the feverish antics and immediate reception her close-knit, sleep-deprived, beat-attired squad find in the established, moray-breaking Parisian and international surrealists. Revolution is here, between the covers."—Gillian Conoley, author of A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems and translator of Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux

Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields

Arts & Photography

Rosemont, Penelope

History & Criticism

City Lights Publishers

Nationwide campus surveys show that students today regard the 1960s as the most attractive, creative, and effective decade of the past century. Above all, the Sixties introduced an inspiring new radicalism—in truth, many new radicalisms, a visionary spirit, and a strong will to change society.Recently, however, neo-conservatives, ex-radicals and boring academics have been doing their worst to trivialize and defame those vibrant years when "Freedom Now" and Solidarity were in the wind. Penelope Rosemont's lively first person account captures the true excitement, intellectual passion, high humor, and diversity of the era.Her story begins in 1964 with the rowdy "Anti-Poetry Club" at Roosevelt University—a group that also included the IWW's Solidarity Bookshop, the journal Rebel Worker, and the legendary Gallery Bugs Bunny.Among the very few Americans welcomed by André Breton into the Surrealist Group in Paris early in 1966, Penelope and her husband Franklin co-organized the Surrealist Group in Chicago later that year. They collaborated on surrealist publications in Paris, Prague, Amsterdam and many other places, as well as in several of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights anthologies. In Chicago, Paris, New York and London, they also visited old-time Wobblies, surrealists, anarchists, socialists and situationists.In 1967 Penelope Rosemont joined the National Office Staff of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and took part in its strategies and actions. As a surrealist, and co-editor of the SDS theoretical journal, Radical America, she also played an important role in uniting a radical culture to a radical politics.

Dreams & Everyday Life: Andre Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, Sds & the Seven Cities of Cibola (Sixties)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Charles H. Kerr

The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of The Surrealist Movement in U.S.

Literature & Fiction

Rosemont, Franklin

Black Swan/Surrealist Editions

Beware of the Ice

Poetry

Penelope Rosemont's first book of articles and essays. It includes nearly two dozen texts originally published in surrealist journals from 1970 through the 90s, plus eleven that appear here for the first time. An ardent defender of all that is most liberating in the revolutionary tradition - from Robin Hood to the L A Rebellion - Rosemont is also a passionate defender of love, wilderness, and the poetic life. In these writings, critical theory embraces the 'language of birds'; poetic humor reveals the open secrets of revolutionary thought at its wildest and brightest; work and its ideological pillars - white supremacy, sexism and miserabilism is exposed; 'lost voices' (Geoge Francis Train, Mary MacLane and others) are retrieved; and the impact on surrealism of such writers as Nancy Cunard and Ten Joans is discussed. Not to mention the revolutionary significance of a fairy tale, the importance of play, the affinities of alchemy and anarchy, poetry in the comics, and the future of surrealism. Includes a foreword by Rikki Ducornet.

Surrealist Experiences

Essays & Correspondence

What was it like? How did they organize? Who invented the slogans that inspired a generation? Never underestimate surrealism: Make Love, Not War! All Power to the Imagination!

Make Love, Not War: Surrealism 1968!

Löwy, Michael

LaCoss, Don

Charles Kerr

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