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"Surprise must be sought for itself, unconditionally."
André Breton, Mad Love
"'The Surprised Poetry' is a poetry that surprises our eyes at each moment of life . . ."
Domingo Moreno Jimenes, "Conversacion al aire libre"
Since itS inception SurrealiSm haS been an international movement, yet only recently have we have begun to appreciate better its history in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba, Haiti, and Martinique. Wifredo Lam, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Jacques Roumain, Légitime Défense, and Tropiques are now, for example, familiar names in the history of Caribbean surrealism. Oddly, like-minded and highly talented writers and painters of the Dominican Republic have received only scant attention, especially in Anglophone histories.
This oversight is unfortunate, since it skips over an important chapter in the history of surrealism. Specifically, the neglect of Dominican surrealist movements has kept La Poesía Sorprendida a little kept secret on the development of Caribbean surrealism. La Poesía Sorprendida was a literary movement and journal that flourished in the Dominican Republic between 1943 and 1947. The editors of the journal, Alberto Baeza Flores, Franklin Mieses Burgos, Mariano Lebrón Saviñón, Freddy Gatón Arce, and Eugenio Granell, defined the movement in primarily surrealist terms and published many of the major modernists of the period. The journal also featured the drawings of Granell, a Spanish surrealist and left-wing exile from fascist Spain. La poesía sorprendida published a total of 21 numbers (at 500 copies per edition), as well as 14 books of poetry. In its time, writers from Latin American, Europe, and the United States recognized La Poesía Sorprendida as an important literary movement. André Breton, who visited the sorprendistas on two separate trips to the Dominican Republic, hailed the literary movement's journal as possess- ing the most "noble quality" of all journals published in Latin America.1
The movement's acclamation by notable international writers, many who also contributed to its journal, as well as its ability to flourish for several years under Trujillo's dictatorship, is itself worth studying. Yet the La Poesía Sorprendida's greatest significance resides in its attempt to rescue the Dominican imagination from the ideological confines of the neocolonial dictatorship. By necessity, the sorprendistas' project was clandestine, and they found in surrealist literary techniques and forms a means to evade the cultural censors...