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Street Artist Banksy, Rhino on the Loose, London, 2024

Welcome to this Tuesday’s Poetics, a challenge familiar to many of you though its form may take many imagined shapes thanks to the creativity of our dVerse pubtenders and poets. Dora here from Dreams from a Pilgrimage hoping to entice you to consider with me how a poem can reimagine the familiar.

Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’ . . . .”

Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, who coined the word defamiliarization
Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889), oil on canvas (MMA, NY) This impressionistic painter took the familiar night sky and defamiliarized it by giving us his unique “impression” of it which, ironically, is now very familiar.

We’ve seen talented and oftentimes anonymous artists create graffiti, taking the familiar sides of buildings and walls and reimagining them, creating memorable, though ephemeral, street art. Yarn bombing is a type of street art that covers a familiar public structure, a park bench or phone booth, defamiliarizing it with a display of knitted or crocheted yarn.

We’ve seen novelists do it in classics like C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces:A Myth Retold where Lewis reimagines the familiar myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. The French nihilist philosopher/novelist Albert Camus in his absurdist work, The Myth of Sisyphus, reinterprets that “tale of futility into a parable of purposeful striving” in which Camus writes, ‘the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart’ . . . ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’”1 In his novel Ulysses the modernist Irish writer James Joyce uses stream-of-consciousness to humorously re-envision that eponymous hero in the cuckolded person of the less-than-heroic Leopold Bloom.

Poet Louise Gluck takes the familiar figure of Circe in Homer’s Odyssey and reimagines her visiting her lover Ulysses’ (Odysseus’) wife, faithful Penelope.

Illustration by Henry Justice Ford (1908) in The CrimsonFairy Book by Andrew Lang: “The ship cut through the waters like a falcon through the air.”
John Williams Waterhouse, The Danaides (1903). The fifty daughters of Danaus, known as the Danaides, all kill their husbands on their wedding night and so are condemned to fill a basin with water for eternity.

Rhina P. Espaillat reimagines Psyche’s relationship with Cupid.

W. B. Yeats’ “The Song of Wandering Aengus” is one of many examples of how poetry can reimagine the familiar, including the ordinary pastime of going fishing.

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
Daniel Garber-Tohickon (1920), oil on canvas Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

In an 1899 letter to fellow poet Dora Sigerson, Yeats called the song “the kind of poem I like best myself—a ballad that gradually lifts … from circumstantial to purely lyrical writing.” He does the same in his 1902 short poem, “In the Seven Woods.”

W. B. Yeats, In the Seven Woods

Mary Oliver reimagines the ordinary act of drinking pond water as something extraordinary.

Eavan Boland takes a look at her familiar, even mundane, neighborhood in the light of the setting sun, defamiliarizing domestic tranquility as something magical in “This Moment.”

Mark Grantham, “Until Tonight” (2019, acrylic on board)
Eavan Boland, This Moment, from A Woman Without a Country: Poems (2014).

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”

Edith Wharton

What I’d like us to do in our poetry is to take something familiar and reimagine it in some way. Here’s a short list of ideas to get you started:

Untitled – by Armenian photographer David Galstyan (1986)

Engaging in a sport or pastime (like Yeats’ poem above)
Gazing at something familiar (like Boland above)
Encountering a fork in the road (Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” comes to mind)
Reading a book

Quint Buchholz, In the Winter, 2013.

Checking the mailbox
Throwing open a window
Dragging on your clothes (e.g., as an act of arming oneself like Achilles perhaps)
Suppressing uncontrollable giggles or hiccups
Taking a walk
Driving a car

Géo Ham- The Forgotten Prince Of Speed.

Boarding a plane or train
Observing a parade or a play

John Ruskin, Blenheim Orange Apple c.1873, Watercolour and bodycolour on heavyweight white wove watercolour paper; 11.7 x 16.5 cm (sight), Private collection

Eating an apple (akin to Oliver’s poem on drinking from a pond)
Washing dishes
Jogging
Or
Tweak a familiar myth or fairytale (like Lewis and Gluck did above) and de-familiarize it with a more modern, personal or iconoclastic perspective

Photo by Lebanon-born photographer Rania Matar, known for her images of women from her home country

Make us see how the familiar or habitual can be uniquely reimagined and defamiliarized.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:
* Write a poem in response to the challenge.
* Post your poem on your blog and link back to this post.
* Enter your name and the link to your post by clicking Mr. Linky below (remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy). Mr. Linky will remain open until 3pm EST on Thursday, February 6th.
* Read and comment on your fellow poets’ work –- there’s so much to derive from reading each other’s writing: new inspiration, new ideas, new friends.