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***ANNOUNCEMENT!***
Call for Poetry Submissions: Krisis: Poetry at the Crossroads // Be a part of an upcoming dVerse anthology in celebration of our 15th anniversary! Find more information here.

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We can use magical realism in our poetry as part of our creative toolbox. Magical realism blends the ordinary with the extraordinary. It places magical or fantastical elements into a realistic setting—but treats them as natural, unquestioned parts of the world. This technique allows poets to explore deep emotional truths, cultural identity, and personal transformation through imaginative yet grounded imagery.

How Poets Can Use Magical Realism
Poets can use magical realism to:

Re-enchant the everyday: Turn a walk through the city into a conversation with ghosts or a whispering tree.

Express emotional truth: Use surreal elements (like a heart turning into a bird) to symbolize grief, love, or hope.

Blend cultures and mythologies: Weave folklore, dreams, or ancestral spirits into contemporary moments.

Challenge reality: Rewrite time, space, or logic to question power, memory, or belonging.

Key Elements to Incorporate
Realistic Setting: A familiar world—urban, rural, personal—anchored in specific detail.

Magical Elements: A miracle, ghost, shapeshifting object, or unexplained event treated as normal.

Matter-of-Fact Tone: No shock or explanation. The magical is accepted.

Themes of Identity or Resistance: Often rooted in post-colonial, cultural, or historical context.

Lyrical Language: Vivid sensory images that blur the real and surreal.

Brief History of Magical Realism in Literature

1. Origins in Prose (1920s–1940s)
Term Origin: Coined in 1925 by German art critic Franz Roh to describe a visual art style blending the real and surreal.

Literary Transition: Latin American writers adapted the concept to prose fiction, using it to reflect post-colonial identity, myth, and politics.

2. Golden Age of Magical Realism in Fiction (1950s–1970s)
Key Works:

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez — the defining novel of the genre.

The Kingdom of This World (1949) by Alejo Carpentier — introduced lo real maravilloso (the marvellous real).

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, and works by Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Salman Rushdie also shaped the genre.

Purpose: To reflect cultures where myth, spirituality, and history are inseparable from daily life.

Magical Realism in Poetry (1970s–Present)
While fiction dominated early magical realism, poets began to explore it more fully in the late 20th century, using surreal imagery within personal or political settings.

Key Transitions and Poets:

Pablo Neruda (Chile) – Odes and love poems that transform mundane subjects into sacred, magical objects (Ode to a Tomato).

Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina) – Explored interior pain and madness using dreamlike, often haunted images.

Octavio Paz (Mexico) – Blended myth, time, and history through lyrical abstraction.

Mark Strand (USA) – Merged existential themes with surreal, dreamlike logic.

Ocean Vuong (Vietnamese-American) – Contemporary poet using magical imagery to reflect trauma, war, and identity.

Here is an example of the poem:

The Lime Orchard Woman

by Alberto Rios

1
As she grows to twelve, her body begins
Its Spring, its hike along the trail
In the mountains that open
Suddenly to show a whole valley
So surprising one forgets
For the moment to breathe.
Her hips, and so her walk,
Her breasts, and so
The way she begins to see
How other people look at her,
How they are caught mid-breath, and shy.
But the day a train first came here,
They look at her like that:
No one staring at her face, no one
Noting a moustache curling up
Like the arms of the bald
He-man posing in the traveling circus
There on the face of the engineer.
She gets angry, steam in her head
The way the engine had
Barely held in, almost bursting.
Angry in the manner that a person might
Take an egg and hold it too hard.
Her breasts begin to grow,
And she gets angry.
Or, she gets angry,
So her breasts begin to grow.
She cannot remember exactly which.

Her mother had told her
This would come,
But told her so quickly, so much
In a hurry and in a small room,
And with the other things,
She neglected to say that also
They would stop growing,
So they might not.
She would have to wear—
She learns this in a dream—
High heels backward on her feet
To keep a symmetry of balance.
The angrier she gets through the months,
The more worried she feels
At the silliness of how
She has begun to grow two new shoulders,
Of how she will have to wear her shoes,
As bigger, one centimeter at a time,
She sprouts out like buds, at first,
Like fast plants,
Then, like the trees,
And finally unstoppable
In their season: fruit.
The future, she reasons, cannot be good.

Read more here.

Writing Challenge: Free verse or use a poetry form to infuse your work with a sense of magical realism. What magical elements might stand out as metaphors or analogies for your own life and how can you create contrast by juxtaposing them with hyper-realistic details and descriptions. You may also want to consider the theme for our 2026 Anthology to write about this challenge.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:

*Write a poem in response to the writing challenge.
*Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr. Linky below
and remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy.
*You will find links to other poets and more will join so please do check
back later in order to read their poems.
*Read and comment on other poets’ work–we all come here to have our poems read.
*Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.

See you at the poetry trail!