Ginsberg's "America"

The 10am class should listen to Ginsberg's poem "America" at this site for Friday's workshop with Trevor. I recommend that everyone check it out, even the 11am writers, as it is fascinating to hear the uproarious laughter the poem elicits.

10am Final Smackdown!

Team Ashley won the 11am smackdown by a fairly solid margin!

This one was a closer, but decisive, vote.

Team Rick

[UNTITLED]

The constricted guillotine had the man staggering.
Pearly gates were fulfilling while he was laughing
because of the drinking.
The woman is no longer ugly,
drinking in her new features,
trying to find out what to do about her diabetic situation.
I put the carcasses of the dead on my tebuchet and
fling them at pro-life activists.
They got cocky and exploded a pidgeon
to start talking to them
about been ugly
drooling over the sight
of my memory of Canton.


** note: a "trebuchet" is sort of like a catapault. While the striking imagery of "drinking in her new features" garnered some praise, and the synaesthesia of "the sight" of a "memory" causes a pleasurable whiplash in the reader,

THE FINAL WINNER OF 10am WAS:

Team Alex

[UNTITLED]

It was a virtuous time
in the mundane area.
The futile woman lays
like a toothpick in an olive
at the botom of dysentary.
Reincarnate and Scientology.
Harsh hammer embalming.
We should expedite the nail.
That was harsh
when you stuck the toothpick in his eye.
He felt like picking it out with the hammer.

**here, the judges felt there was just no ignoring the surrealistic associative leap bridged by the "toothpick" images. The toothpick is a "futile woman" who, eventually, reappears "stuck in his eye." There is no trifling with that!

11 am Team Exquisite Corpses

Here are the 11am contenders for the Final Corpse Smackdown! The 10am class will vote for the winner.

Team James:

[UNTITLED]

I went out to a club once with some friends and we bumped into a girl who looked like an aardvark.
Her nose was long and hairy
with the air passing through while breathing.
I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Mango
who is slimy, greasy, and sprung.
The girl used a piccolo in many special ways,
but this time she decided to use a pickle instead.
She used it so well it became tattered
like two week old cottage cheese
with aardvark breath
in Captain Hollywood face.



Team Ashley:

THE DAY WE LOST THE PLUMBER

The mysterious rock was almost buried
in the moist earth.
Mushy poop:
disgusting toilet
with all the contents pushing up.
Round two begins:
broccoli is gross,
glorious flowers that grew along the path.
The woods are dying with each step.
And the barracuda steals pineapples
and feeds them to his pet
whose name is George Bush.

Radio Broadcast Links:

Hour One

Hour Two

Another great resource.

Why Post to Your Blog?

Next time your grandma asks you why you publish your work on your blog where it is available to an audience of millions, rather than printing it on a piece of dead tree that will get lost in some dusty corner, go fetch her bifocals and have her read this Publisher's Weekly article.

Avocados = Hay

Here is an intriguing sister site to the original mission of CreativeAvocados: to explore the role of Avocados in art. Here we have Hay in art. This connoisseur claims to have read over 3000 poems in English that contain the word "hay."

There are some beautiful images to be found on the hay home page.

More Art!

Some of you (well . . . Trevor) were interested in visiting the Sticker show at the Brush Gallery over at SLU. Well . . . the Posse is doing a free sticker workshop on Wednesday, April 5. Slugz will be there in person! All the sticker materials you can eat!

More Links...

...at this great list.

Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Read it, see it:

LIT CRIT

This promises to be a very interesting article for anyone curious about what younger poets are writing.

More Altered Books

Assess this!

More Fun with Words...

Magnet Poetry! courtesy of Alysson.

OULIPO

Check out this book about one of the most famous creative writing workshops ever and some of their exercises.

Canton's Lone Beatnik has done it again!

Get Published! Win Cash Prizes!

Everyone remember to submit some work to our very own excellent campus publication Grasse Roots. Send your work pronto, as the deadline looms, to GrasseRoots@canton.edu

The Gallery Has a Posse! Obey!

Don't forget to check out the sticker art show at the SLU gallery. And get your fresh AvocadoManifesto right underneath Andre:

XChibi Muses & Meows on Workshop

XChibi breaks the seal on workshop! Check out her thoughts (and multimedia links) on her experience in class in her Feb. 17th post.

No, no, no, nevermind-- DO THIS:

Drop everything and check out Poems That GO

Negative Capability

Here is a link to John Keats's famous letter of 1817 in which he proclaims the genius of "Negative Capability."

Beatsong sans bongos

Canton's Lone Beatnik has mixed up his own folksong. Check it out here!

Neighborhood Soundscape Folksongs

OK, this is fascinating stuff. Is it poetry, art, or music?
Listen to the radio show and check out the musuem. Make your own folksong!

Human / Document = Humument

For more of this follow the Humument link in the last post.

Exercises Out There

Endless limitations.

And this one is WILD:
Humument.

WELCOME TO HEADQUARTERS, AVOCADO FANS!

Please follow the links, on the right hand side of this page, to find the latest literary creations and analysis here in the blogosphere.

BlogMa #5

It's time to own up to what we've all known from the very beginning: there is Fear and Loathing in Canton and it has been out-blogging everyone from DayOneGroundZero. Crepuscular visions downbeating through and into the void splayed on not-ironic blackbackground to McDonald's go go go output, that automatic production of such moments as we are if alive eyes living to look all night long just slightly less awake than our eyeballs tucking us in.

GutCult

Check out the newest issue of this online journal for fifteen fabulous writers and one mediocre one tackling the oldest concern in, hopefully, some new thoughtful ways. The issue also starts off with some thoughts from the editor.

Portrait Of and Poem By

BALLAD OF THE SALVATION ARMY -Kenneth Fearing

On Fourteenth street the bugles blow,
Bugles blow, bugles blow.
The red, red, red, red banner floats
Where sweating angels split their throats,
Marching in burlap petticoats,
Blow, bugles, blow.

God is a ten car Bronx express,
Red eyes round, red eyes round.
“Oh where is my lustful lamb tonight,
His hair slicked down and his trousers tight?
I’ll grind him back to my glory light!”
Roll, subway, roll.

Heaven is a free amusement park,
Big gold dome, big gold dome.
Movies at night: “The life she led.”
Everyone sleeps in one big bed.
The stars go around inside your head.
Home, sweet home.

On Fourteenth street the bugles blow,
Bugles blow, bugles blow,
The torpid stones and pavements wake,
A million men and street-cars quake
In time with angel breasts that shake,
Blow, bugles, blow!

BlogMa #4

In the interest of promoting increased reading and referencing across the blogosphere, the latest (and all future) Blog Of the Moment Awards will be announced here at CreativeAvocados. So, witness, like Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster, how Rick at "Breaking the Mold without Forgetting the Old" (BMFO) has run the shock of existence into the Writing Workshop Exercise by giving it a life outside the classroom. Astute readers will note how the Monster, once given the freedom of life, has also begun to report on the facts of its own existence. Women and children first, flee towards rescue at BMFO.

Knowledge, Forms, The Aviary

This very intriguing book arrived over the weekend. It's by a woman named Karla Kelsey, and it begins thus:

*
*
*
into the street making
this the movement. What
we call home comprised
into lake-ripple
and pictured. Sold
unto a title of time, of
composition
into the back of the chair
a waiting within
the network: a visor
and a mask
*
*
*

No Nudity No Violence Unspeakable Obscenity

Speaking of art, on Friday night I watched an incredible movie called The Aristocrats. For those of you who are interested in hearing a whole slew of talented artists talk about unleashing the creative process from the restraints of society, I highly recommend this movie. Warning: it is the most obscene movie you will ever see. And it's just people talking.

Shelby's List

Here is an interesting list of online experimental journals.

Last Week's Work

Here's a most recent production I wrote for a show of "Sticker Art" that's going on at the Brush Gallery at SLU later this spring. Anyone who has walked a city (or town) street has seen this form of street art: crazy stickers with drawings or "grafitti tags" that artists stick wherever they can. This little essay-manifesto will appear on the back of the flyer for the show:

DO [SOMETHING/OBEY]

The landscape is illegal.
People need & see things, incessantly.
Walk these city streets: two straight lines cannot enclose or animé a space: as origami has insides and inside its folds, also: it has wings made from the making of its wings: it flies only if on fire and flies best in a frigid fall day: that’s the thermal physics of this city: rambling text of tags, men in drag: Nike Nike Prada bag: the streets run straight to make paid-for space: upwards at their edges are walls a crime to art on: unless for selling something else: pomegranate juice, community, fruit-infused vodka from the former eastern regime: slap-stick this spectacle with your own situationism: be enthusiastic: preexisting aesthetic elements in the winedark boulevards, the sunrise [something/obeys] among them: your First Amendment must be adhesive against search & seizure from these streets: this gallery: it is forbidden to be forbid: your Fourth Amendment only [something/obeys] its own profligeration without profit: you’re owning your own looking: move ahead: see what you can make of it.

We Have No Avos for Odes

As a fan of the LiteraryAvocado, this poem here drove me wild! It’s by Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet many people know from the movie Il Postino. This piece created a lot of delicious tension for me because . . . well, I won’t give it away until the end of the poem. Check it out:

ODE TO THE COLOR GREEN

When earth
was
bald and quiet
silence and scars,
expanses
of dry lava
and frozen rock,
green
appeared,
the color green:
trefoil,
acacia,
river
of green water.

Unexpectedly
the crystal spilled
and the numerous greens
grew
and multiplied:
greens of grass and eyes,
greens of marine love,
greens of belfry,
thin
greens for
net, algae, sky;
for the forest
a trembling green,
for grapes
and acid green.

Earth’s
dress,
population of foliage,
not merely
one
but
the multiplication
of the wide green
darkened like
green night,
clear and sharp
like
a green violin,
thick in the thickness,
metallic, sulphuric
in the copper
mine, venomous
in the oxidized lances,
humid in the clasp
of the mire,
virtue of beauty.

Window of the moon in motion,
livid, dead greens
which glow
under Autumn’s light
in the dagger of the eucalyptus, cold
like a fish’s skin,
green sicknesses,
Saturnian neon signs
that hurt you
with oppressive light,
flying green
of the nuptial firefly,
and tender
soft
green
of lettuce when
it receives the sun in drops
from chaste lemons
squeezed
by a green hand.

The green
I never had,
neither have,
nor would have,
the submarine and subterranean brilliance,
the light
of the emerald,
green eagle among the rocks, eye
of the abyss, frozen butterfly,
star which failed
to find the sky
and buried
its green wave
in the deepest
terrestrial chamber,
and there
like a rosary
of hell,
sea fire or tiger’s heart,
splendid you slept, green rock,
fingernail of the mountains,
fatuous river,
hostile statue, hardened green.
(trans. Lozano)

Like the best horror film you ever saw that never said boo!, I find this poem bizarre and wonderful: there are SO MANY places where Neruda could have said “avocado,” but didn’t. When I find a piece of literature called “Ode to the Color Green,” and the third line is “bald and quiet,” I immediately picture an avocado.

The ways this piece thwarted my literary expectations were very effective—and I dare anyone to write a poem with the word green in it over and over so many times, but always necessary, relevant, and new. (Although, I have to admit, by the time he’s writing about “green eagle among the rocks,” I’m thinking, why not an avocado? Green eagle?

I checked the original and there it is: águila verde entre las piedras. Does anyone know Spanish well enough to tell me if “green eagle” is some sort of slang or saying? It makes ME think of Dr. Seuss, which I don’t think was the author’s intent. I checked, and the Spanish for avocado isn’t in this ode.

That’s another thing that I love about avocados, they never get lost in translation.

Beautiful Avocado

Welcome Avocados!

This blog is dedicated to all things that are both creative AND avocados.
You can get your first taste here and here.
Mmmm, mmmm!