No Pink Armadillo
This week’s poem moves into surrealist territory. No Pink Armadillo is also what I call a slant-sonnet, which you can read more about in the blog post where I announced the original publication. It is also at least slightly derived from the armadillos of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, which I discussed previously at the link above and in another earlier post.
But today let’s just think about surrealism in poetry. Surrealism comes out of the work of French poets such as Rimbaud, Mallermé, Baudelaire, Apollinaire. You can read a literary definition here.
Or you can take my own, more down-to-earth, definition as a guideline:
Surrealism is allowing the subconscious self to speak through a collage of images and thoughts which, while realistic in part, also present a dream-like unreality.
As such, a surreal poem should be expected to feel a little bit like that stage between being asleep and awake, when your conscious mind isn’t censoring or clarifying your thoughts. Instead your subconscious mind is pulling images and ideas together in an organic, unexpected, if possibly less coherent, manner.
No Pink Armadillo
There was no pink armadillo.
No smudge of someone’s fire-cooked sausages in the air.
No escape from thorns cast on each digital divide.
Tears accumulated behind solid surfaces,
climbed the inchoate walls plastered with caution tape,
wires, poles, street signs wearing ripped fabric tied like streamers.
There was only the morning’s dampness,
caught between the out-there and in-here.
No one felt today ending even as it kept on starting.
There was one teaspoon left.
Children ate the others with the rest of the innards.
The one spoon they bent and bent
until the bowl fell away from the shank.
Stem. Handle. Then measured in scoops and pounds.
What do you think about surrealism?
People often enjoy surrealist paintings, if only because they are so offbeat compared with the expectations of daily reality. At the same time, surrealist work can be disturbing, juxtaposing ideas and images we would not normally put together, and revealing thoughts we haven’t yet articulated or would rather not face.
Consider the image above, or the one that opens this post. What if a fork is a shadow of a spoon? What does that mean? How do you take that idea? Is it interesting? Disturbing? Do you delight in the surprise? Does it mean something deeper to you? Does it tug on something that’s difficult to articulate? What’s your response to surrealist work?
If you enjoyed No Pink Armadillo
No Pink Armadillo originally appeared in Foundry, Issue 4, June 2017. You can read more of my work on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.
Have a great week! And look for another poem next Monday.