On Craig Raine, Poets, & Aliens

Thomas C. Foster writers about Craig Raine and the "Martian School of Poetry" in an essay called, intriguingly, "Maybe Poets Are, in Fact Martians," at Literary Hub. The poet, Craig Raine, has a 1979 poem called "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" and in the era of Mork & Mindy, Foster points out that Raine's intention with the poem was not so much "space travel but defamiliarization." From there: 

This is a term coined by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917 for a process we might call “making strange,” or taking commonplace elements of our experience and making them alien to us, as if we never saw them before.

There are many ways a poet may make things strange. One, obviously, is the Raine path: take familiar items and self-consciously make them alien to us. It’s a small school, but he is hardly the first nor the last. Membership in the actual “Martian School” was mostly limited to him and Christopher Reid, with a handful of ancillary figures. But we can go back to the Romantic era, to William Blake, who didn’t need to make things strange because he was strange. Most who know his name do so from “Tyger, tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night,” but he can go so much further than that. In his visionary and prophetic poems he can be nearly impenetrable even two hundred years later. Later avatars might include Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology consists of dramatic monologues by the residents of the Spoon River Cemetery; the mostly French and Spanish adherents of surrealism, which got strange pretty fast, but also American poets influenced by surrealism such as Robert Bly and John Ashbery, as well as Deep Image poets such as Diane Wakoski and Clayton Eshleman, and Ted Hughes, whose nature is never warm and fuzzy.

Read more at Literary Hub.