Approach
Through the heavy use of curious, exotic and humorous visual metaphors, Martian Poetry aimed to break the grip of 'the familiar', by describing ordinary things in unfamiliar ways, as though, for example, through the eyes of a Martian. For instance, books and their effects upon readers are described by Raine as...
- mechanical birds with many wings
- perch on the hand
- cause the eyes to melt
- or the body to shriek without pain
This drive to make the familiar strange was carried into fiction by Martin Amis. His 1981 novel Other People: A Mystery Story where the story unfolds from the point of view of a protagonist who is apparently suffering from amnesia.
Martian poetry became a popular topic in the teaching of poetry composition to school children.
Related to Surrealism, it arose in the context of the experimental poetry of the late 1960s; but also owes a debt to a variety of English traditions including metaphysical poetry, Anglo-Saxon riddles, and nonsense poetry (e.g.: Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear). Dr Samuel Johnson's descriptions of the metaphysical poets' approach where 'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together' could aptly describe much Martian poetry; in this context what was distinctive about Martian Poetry was its focus on visual experience.
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Famous quotes containing the word approach:
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
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“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
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Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
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“So live that when thy summons comes to join
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Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
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