Michael Gould

About

In the early Seventies I wrote Surrealism and the Cinema. Neither conventionally academic nor commercially oriented — downright iconoclastic it was — it found a place in university film courses and libraries.

The book resulted from years of film viewing, film making, programming films (for the film society at Brandeis University) and reviewing films. My first really substantial writing, it was picked up by one of the major publishers of serious film criticism of the day. I received a Canada Council Grant (for writing on film) and lectured on surrealism and film at universities and art institutes in Canada and New Zealand. Then I changed direction.

In writing the film book I had acquired a love of words. Combined with my love of images and surrealism my writing morphed into the writing of short, humorous verse and imaginary titles.  I thought the titles would be for the novels I would write one day; many thousands of titles later I have yet to write those stories, finding the brevity of titles more intriguing.

I love rhyme and alliteration and lament their disappearance from contemporary verse and I use these devices, along with surreal juxtaposition. Lovers of wordplay take note: Aardvarks after Dark is a collection of a thousand of my best titles. My verse — I warn you, some of it is quite perverse — can be found in Writing or my blog.