You can argue that poetry does that all the time, but I would say it usually makes clear that the unexplained or magical-seeming pairings are metaphorical. Things are “like” other things, or “seem like” different things. They even become other things, but always suggesting a similarity, not a random magical event.
I would say that magical realism in poetry (and fiction) removes the argument of “likeness”. It plunges the reader straight into an altered world, offering only mystery as a doorway. It isn’t always an easily entered door, but once you walk through, things have changed. Life has changed for you.
Consider Louise Gluck‘s poem, “The Wild Iris”. ‘It doesn’t use metaphor or simile. The story is simply told from the point of view of a flower that is somehow conscious. The iris comprehends death differently than a human being does, and yet its experience resonates with ours in some way. To become a wildflower, to die and be reborn from your essence, these aren’t our ordinary states, but the poem takes us on that imagined journey and by the end, our reality has shifted.
That is what magical realism does. It shifts our understanding of reality, loosens it, invites entry into other dimensions and altered possibilities. Maybe reality isn’t as solid and predictable as we thought. Maybe a flower can be conscious. Maybe we can be dead and yet alive.
Here is the poem. See if you would call it magical realism.
The Wild Iris
by Louise Gluck
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
Read another essay on Magical Realism in Poetry here. This one features English poet Alice Oswald, whose transformations are as marvelous as the poem above.
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