Poetry Games With Breakfast

Creative prompts are everywhere! Thanks, Surrealism!

I’ll see you for more poetic play at our next live IMAGE WORD MYSTERY CREATIVE JAM:

Saturday, March 9th, on Zoom: 9am Pacific/ 11am Central/ 12pm Eastern (head here to find your timezone)

All paid tiers— Link for paid subscribers will go out next week!

“exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern”

To be met last weekend with such a ferociously surreal hellscape on the back of our Maple Shredded Wheat box was my definition of #blessed, honestly…

“Cool Hullabaloo: Find the Arctic Oddities” is clearly more than just a game cooked up to haunt your children during breakfast…

After recovering from my initial revulsion, I realized our cereal box had issued us an invitation to envision the world anew & decreed we must make poetic meaning of this utter mayhem forthwith!

Neon, of course, was down to play. And thus— over a cup of tea, two poems were born of this unholy chaos realm.

Here’s what I wrote in response to the cereal box surreality:

remember this:  you go at the speed of the rhino 
when the rhino's in the lead
whether a bear or a bobsled
walk softly

when the rhino's in the lead
in your wayward caravan
walk softly
your wise one in the center is eyeing you, an oddity

in your wayward caravan
she never forgets
your wise one in the center is eyeing you, an oddity
"you can teach a man to fish," she quips , "but can you teach a fish to man?"

she never forgets
whether a bear or a bobsled
"you can teach a man to fish," she quips again, "but can you teach a fish to man?"
remember this:  you go at the speed of the rhino 

[Sat. Feb. 24th, 2024 inspired by "Cool Hoolabaloo: Find the Arctic Oddities" game on the back of Best Choice brand Maple & Brown Sugar Frosted Shredded Wheat box.]

[Please enjoy our arthouse readings in which Neon & I reveal our poetic masterpieces to one another & giggle]

Here’s the text of Neon’s cereal box poem:

Unhindered by reality
The man-fish tallies his atrocities, smiling
A penguin walks a high-wire
And frozen pipes put out no fires

The man-fish tallies his atrocities, smiling
Sand or snow, a desert’s a desert
And frozen pipes put out no fires
A pachyderm tows a snowmobile

Sand or snow, a desert’s a desert
Oases and igloos, ursus maritimus
A pachyderm tows a snowmobile
Chaos without meaning

Oases and igloos, ursus maritimus
A penguin walks a high-wire
Chaos without meaning
Unhindered by reality

Neon describes his piece as “a bit Coleridge-esque with touches of Dali”, so here’s Salvador Dalí by anti-fascist, Surrealist poet David Dascoyne, written in 1936

The face of the precipice is black with lovers;
The sun above them is a bag of nails; the spring's
First rivers hide among their hair.
Goliath plunges his hand into the poisoned well
And bows his head and feels my feet walk through his brain.
The children chasing butterflies turn round and see him there
With his hand in the well and my body growing from his head,
And are afraid. They drop their nets and walk into the wall like smoke.

The smooth plain with its mirrors listens to the cliff
Like a basilisk eating flowers.
And the children, lost in the shadows of the catacombs,
Call to the mirrors for help:
'Strong-bow of salt, cutlass of memory,
Write on my map the name of every river.'

A flock of banners fight their way through the telescoped forest
And fly away like birds towards the sound of roasting meat.
Sand falls into the boiling rivers through the telescopes' mouths
And forms clear drops of acid with petals of whirling flame.
Heraldic animals wade through the asphyxia of planets,
Butterflies burst from their skins and grow long tongues like plants,
The plants play games with a suit of mail like a cloud.

Mirrors write Goliath's name upon my forehead,
While the children are killed in the smoke of the catacombs
And lovers float down from the cliffs like rain.

I invite you to write your own Surrealist cereal box poem!

Andre Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto defines surrealism as:

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

Surrealism emerged in the deeply scarred landscape of post-World War I Europe. Breton himself served in a psychiatric hospital for soldiers suffering from the newly defined “shell-shock”. This war was more technologically advanced than any prior— and because cameras had become personally portable, images of war and its staggering toll proliferated at scale around the globe for the first time in human history and people had trouble handling it!

It’s oddly not hard to imagine this overwhelm from where we sit 100 years later…

But Surrealists viewed creative experimentation as a tool for revolution in a fragmented new world where all meaning had broken down.

A real question for you:

Can creative play this silly, “exempt from any …aesthetic concern”, be a tool for revolution today?

Or has the surreal infiltrated even the innermost hallways of generic cereal brand factories— by which I mostly mean politics & “fake news” media. [Wanna recoil at “the absence of any control exercised by reason”, tune into Fox News…]. I guess I’m wondering if the surreal has been leveraged against us as yet another tool of disorientation for the purpose of control— a way of saying, Nothing makes any sense anymore, right? You should probably just give up now/ vote for me/ buy my shoes…etc…

Or—

Are we now seeing a return to Surrealist themes like automatic writing and art intersected with dreamwork precisely because our political/technological/media landscape again demands we take meaning-making into our own hands?

These are the kinds of things I like to think about over breakfast…

I look forward to hearing your thoughts & reading your own surrealist cereal box inspired poetry!

Until next time, remember this: you go at the speed of the rhino.