Magical realism magical realism poetry

Magical Realism in Poetry – Louise Gluck

I would say that magical realism in poetry (and fiction) removes the argument of “likeness”. It simply plunges the reader mysteriously into an altered world. It offers mystery as a doorway. It isn’t always an easily entered door, but once you walk through, things have changed.

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.

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Magical realism magical realism poetry poetry poetry review

Magical Realism in Poetry – Alice Oswald

I’ve been reviewing a book by a favorite poet lately, Alice Oswald, and thinking about magical realism in poetry. I realized one of the qualities I love in her poetry could be termed magical realism, if that term can encompass verse and imagery that evolves into story. Oswald is an acclaimed British poet, author of the award-winning book Dart, and has published a total of eleven volumes of verse. I happened to dive back into…

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magical realism poetry poetry

Lunar New Year Poetry 2023

New Poetry February 2023 I seem to be writing more poetry in this new year. Lunar new year feels more like a fresh start than did January 1. Flexing my February 2023 without regard to form, publishing opportunities, or any of that. A form of journaling with line breaks and compression, if you will. A new year calls for new tunes. And haiku is returning in my reading hours, so I’m thinking sometimes with a…

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magical realism poetry poetry

Poetry as a Winter Sport

I’ve finished a novel and will see it published on December 27 of this year. Attending to a lot of the homework of promoting a new book, I find myself yearning for a new long-form story, wading through many plot, character, and title ideas, and yet frozen as the leaves that remain on the trees in this wintry month. I can’t summon energy to write scenes and do plot outlines, so I fall back into…

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Magical realism magical realism poetry

The Department of Lost Hours: a magical realism poem

The Department of Lost Hours Where do they put them, the lost hours of saved daylight? Are they stored in a dusty government office, an accidentally-funded pocket of the federal budget? Stashed away by clever clock drones who save enough to craft an alternate century. As autumn hones our edges, brightens the leaves, and billows gray above, the hours dim, shrink, and turn in on themselves. All I want to do is turn and go…

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Magical Realism & Time Travel – the What-If Game

History and magic are a powerful combination. Time travel can be a form of magical realism fiction, depending on the writer’s approach. In a magical realism treatment, you’re in one world and then another opens around you like a blossom. In my magical realism style of time travel, there are laws to the ability to move through time, but the focus isn’t on the mechanisms (science fiction style), nor on characters living in a different…

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Considering Magical Realism in Poetry

Magical Realism in Poetry Poetry is more likely to wander into magic realism than fiction by its very nature. Metaphor is bringing two unlike things together for a startling result, a transformation. A magic trick of effect. Because most contemporary poetry lives more in metaphor than narrative (discuss!), the realism quickly shifts into an altered state. To make a point, but tell it slant, you sometimes make an alternate universe that is more real than…

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Poetry’s wonderful world of magic and realism

Poetry’s wonderful world of magic — that’s almost redundant. Isn’t the elevated world of a poem necessarily a magical one? The magic comes from close attention –the writer’s and the reader’s — to people, beings, relationships, and things. But every poem needs specifics to ground the reader, to help a reader  enter the world of the poem.

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Magical Realism in Poetry & Pattiann Rogers’ Cat

What is magical realism in poetry? Possibly it’s defined by what isn’t magical realism in a poem. One might ask what is magical realism in fiction, but in poetry, in a poem, it’s what both is and isn’t. It’s the magical field created around ordinary images with ordinary language. The establishing of an entire field outside of, and at the same time, inside what we call reality. A great example of a magical realism poem…

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