Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Poet's Korner

Today we bring you the latest from Chris Peebles and, to be frank, he’s testing our capacity for empathy with this one. It all started last summer when our money boat was struck and sold for scrap, forcing The Kreation Korner staff and kontributors to pursue more conventional forms of gainful employment. Since then, Peebles was hired on as a nonperishables buyer for Tsar Mart and became a father. As the following poem suggests, these life-changing events have precipitated a full embrace on his part of the middle-class lifestyle in all its predictable, humdrum glory. While it’s not our place to judge and certainly not our place to police the expression of our kontributors, we feel it’s important to at least point out that Chris’s “domestic trip,” though he has every right to pursue it, can have negative consequences for our movement as it perpetuates the sort of suburban banality an originalist interpretation of the Kreationist Manifesto tells us to fight against. It’s troubling that one of the sturdiest pillars of Kreationism could be so seduced by such un-kreative fantasy, but we do acknowledge that a person can assume multiple personae all at once, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes clashing, in the ever-unfolding ballet of human experience. We're confronted with the reality that there are no easy answers--we’ll give Chris credit for that much at this point. We’re still unpacking this, and it will take time to arrive at a final ruling, if any. If you wish to consider a fully-formed opinion at this time, stay tuned after the poem for a short review by budding kreation kritic Schuyler Graves. Proceed with caution:

“Content of Contentment”

I’ve found stability in my life
The Dove of Balance snatched up my strife
Vanished into the majestic sky
Make sense of life? I no longer try

I’m now at ease with life’s contradictions
I calmly surmount all its frictions
Not anxious nor angry, self-destructive nor mean
I’ve found comfort and joy in consistent routine

--Chris Peebles
Chris Peebles the archetypical family man, pictured September 2016 smoking the traditional tobacco product of new fatherhood and engaging with a popular brand of canned fizzy water. He's probably out there grilling or something.

Review: “Content of Contentment”/Chris Peebles/2017 
To say Chris Peebles new poem for The Kreation Korner is confounding is an understatement among understatements. “Content of Contentment” is a full-on head-scratcher  Though the composition is short and sweet for the snapchat age, its sentimentality and naïveté could fill vast volumes. Is this THE Chris Peebles, The Korner’s franchise player, Boise’s legendary street poet laureate reduced to silly rhymes and embarrassing metaphors (“Dove of Balance” deserves its own level on the cringe scale)? After wincing my way through the two cloying quatrains, I seriously questioned Peebles' credibility. Have we been duped? Has he been just another over-represented over-hyped mediocre white male artist all along? 

That's what I thought at first. 

Then I realized I’d been played like Dig Dug. If we’ve learned to expect anything about Peebles it’s that he’ll invariably subvert our expectations. And subvert he has! But he employs a device far more sophisticated and enduring than the garden-variety irony used to elicit a passing guffaw (although an overtone of that signature self-awareness is of course present). It’s possible that Chris is being completely sincere, and, if so, should we not applaud him for daring to make himself vulnerable in this lingering postmodern nightmare in which the pressures to drape oneself in the veils of cleverness and coolness are so great? Are we the readers, Peebles ultimately asks of us, ready to incorporate sincerity meaningfully into our lives as a healthy counterweight to our cynicism? Congratulations, Chris, on a landmark addition to the Kreative Kanon. I’m not ashamed to admit that at least some small part of me now wishes the Dove of Balance would swoop down and snatch my strife away. 
--Schuyler Graves

Monday, May 22, 2017

Poet's Korner

on my daily stroll I remained
detached but made keen aesthetic
observations of the pulsating
urban ecosystem          then I went
to the country and was
struck suddenly and violently
by a stark epiphany
of spiritual immediacy

--Flâneur O'Connor

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Konsolation Korner

Hiya, Kornheads. Your faithful Kreation Korner staff returned this morning from a much-needed retreat in South Beach to unplug and recharge. That may be a paradox but it worked--one of those mysteries of life we guess. Anyways, only moments after we'd shuffled our mentally, emotionally, and physically refreshed selves into the HQ and reconnected to the interworld, we were shocked (on the inside, but remained serene on the outside) that Gabe Gabriel II, whom we'd left behind to helm the Korner in our stead, had deleted precious kontent which had been posted by Hadley Daughterson just before we exited our offices en masse to board a chartered omnibus for SoBea. The younger Gabe's reasoning behind this kardinal infraction was that the post purported to be satire, which as he dubiously indicates is impossible in a "post-satire age." Many of us saw the kontent in kwestion before our departure and can assure you that it was very satirical indeed. It was a piece of graphic art konsisting of three panels, each a mock periodical-style advertisement for a politician, the konceit being that, in late kapitalism, democracy is a farce and the elected official is just another silly product for us to konsume. We felt this kontent was sufficiently satirical and we will not subscribe to Gabriel II's rather bleak and defeatist worldview that satire is dead. We must kontinue to act as a check on would-be tyrants. If we were to simply give up, we would be komplicit in the normalization of their chikanery. To hop down from the soapbox for a moment, let us not forget who was really hurt in all this--Hadley Daughterson, who was so incensed by this unfortunate affair that she, in protest, released a potent hacking tool created by our own government into the kloud, expunging any and all rekoverable ghosts of the removed work. Sadly, her inspired (and inspiring) triptych will never again be beheld by human eyes, or those of any species. Although rekompense in this matter is impossible as all acts of kreation are irreplaceable, we have authorized Hadley to jump to the front of the production queue and publish two (instead of the usual allotment of one) new komiks. We know it's only modest succor but hope it will serve as a salve for everyone affected during this hopefully short-lived dark chapter for Kreationism. In the meantime, we've sent young Gabe to South Beach for an intensive three-day refresher kourse on our standards and practices. Take and eat:






Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Satire Korner

"What's Your Brand?"


--Hadley Daughterson