Martian Poetry
Recently I’ve really enjoyed reading Craig Raine’s poetry and his technique of ‘martian poetry’. The premise is simply to write as though you were a martian, encountering the world and all its wonderful gadgets and gizmos as alien artefacts. This has inspired me as a writer to look at things as though I’d never seen them before, to look upon the world with new eyes. This is, after all, the goal of any writer who strives for originality in their work. Raine manages to make the ordinary extraordinary, the terrestrial extraterrestrial. Mundane objects and perfunctory actions are transformed by a fresh choice of language. Here’s a leaf out of his book, so to speak: ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ by Craig Raine (1979) Caxtons* are mechanical birds with many wings (*books) and some are treasured for their markings - they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand. Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on the ground: then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper. Rain is when the earth is television. It has the property of making colours darker. Model T* is a room with the lock inside - (*cars) a key is turned to free the world for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed. But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience. In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up. If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger. Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises alone. No one is exempt and everyone’s pain has a different smell. At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs and read about themselves - in colour, with their eyelids shut. (All rights are with the poet)
