Kayak, George Hitchcock's seminal magazine (published between 1964 and 1984), chronicles the sustained exchange during the 1970s between deep-image and surrealist poetics. Kayak's declared interest in "surrealist, imagist, and political poems," combined with lithographic design and surreal collages, created a visual and conceptual print-space for the decade's interest in the political and psychic potential of the poetics of the individual and collective unconscious. In this presentation, I examine the stylistic features of the poetry of Kayak, specifically our cognitive processing of surreal images themselves and how they function structurally. As part of the magazine's radicalizing discourse, surreal images create metaphors that violate the customs of figurative language and confront us in their incompatibility.  This kind of poetry, and the way we try (and fail) to understand it, resembles the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 70s that was being consolidated into artistic expression. In the cultural delirium of this time, individuals attempt to make sense out of the experience of modern life by seeking meaning in contexts that offer a shared frame of reference for disparate phenomena. Sometimes the search is successful, at other times it is frustrated; in either case, the experience is reflective of the hysteria of the surreal poetry of Kayak.