University of Cape Town – ELL1016S

 ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ Poetry Essay

‘You’re a Stranger here yourself’:
Or, why it only sounds poetic when you make the world seem more confusing

“Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don’t trust ambiguity.”
– John Wayne, Star of innumerable Westerns.

When people do dream, is it really true to say they’re “read[ing] about themselves-/ in colour, with their eyelids shut.”? (Raine, 2000: 96. ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ v. 33-34) Presumably that is the phenomenon that the final verses of Craig Raine’s poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ (1979) are referring to and, while it may take a re-reading or three, can’t every ‘object’ of the poem’s many flights-of- fancy similarly and ultimately be reduced back to just a set of empirically evident things? I’d have to say so and, for me, this is ‘defamiliarization’s’ unavoidable stumbling block as an artistic ideal. A technique that seeks, in the present guise of ‘Martianism’, to enact the cliché of ‘giving the reader new eyes to see the world’ can be shown, under uncharitable analysis, to be only a quite disposable set of kaleidoscopically-tinted glasses that pretty much leave the world itself untouched. Not that poetry has to change the world- in the Marxian sense or indeed any other- but that is one of the things it can do so as to seem more than just the sum of a collection of word games presented for the reader’s entertainment. Martianism as a movement seems to share many tropes with the majority of postmodern poetry, but I would say its most easily recognizable is a kind of decentered urge to narrate the world from the third person; that is, to have an actually centered observer tell the ‘truth’ of the quotidian ubiquity that has more recently replaced ‘the Human Condition’ as the subject of art. The problem being that when you see through this desire, what’s left on the page is nothing but a poet’s self-alienation and the poem’s eventual solipsism. All of which could support an unruly thesis, but, for now, let’s put the ‘liberal’ in ‘Liberal Arts’ and set out on a comparatively charitable exploration of what Raine’s poem does affect in us and how its idealistic bent reflects the posturing of the ‘Martianist’ poet and the conversant Martian in question here.

It’s an appropriate coincidence that the writing of Raine’s poem coincided (both 1979) with the publication of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition.Not just because they respectively complement each other as an evocation and analysis of the decentered (post)modern strangeness of the time (and since), but that they both apparently agree on the fundamental point that “(e)clecticism [has become] the degree zero of contemporary general culture” (Lyotard, 1979). Of course, the French philosopher is referring more directly here to the fact that ‘general culture’ by 1979 already meant an inextricable mish-mash of American fast-food meals, Caribbean music and Swedish furniture, but it’s clear that the English poet essentially concurs in his own attempt to take an even more radically objective perspective. Were a Martian, Raine intimates as his founding metaphor, to arrive and analyze our society as a human commentator already does, they would surely come to classify experience itself as an eclectic category. It seems we don’t just take our daily lives for granted; we also don’t know how not to take them for granted. This is where the poet should- and, in this case, does- step in: his role is to list the potentialities of description that would make up for the ambiguities too often ignored in the numbing routine of normative consciousness. So, when the poet addresses the nature of ‘Rain’- an everyday phenomenon if there ever was one, especially for an Englishman- a line has to be crossed in its figurative depiction. This rain does not connote a mood or a person or any distant Proustian moment; it instead denotes, in the fantastical space of poetry, the blurred grey scramble of a broken television screen, so Raine’s ‘Rain’ is now, in itself, a period of time “when the earth is television” (v.11), plain and simple. There’s also an odd history lesson in the use of the terms “Caxtons” (v. 1) and “Model T” (v.13) to represent books and cars respectively, as if the prototypical forms of these everyday objects are embedded in their casual usage now, which, one guesses, is abstractly true, in the sense that origins can define the futures of everything. I’d say this is why Raine’s poem is not inherently political: this kind of ordinary ignorance is not ideological ‘false consciousness’- the kind that obscures power relations- but what I’d call ‘rushed consciousness’- which reduces the things and processes of the world to the use-values we give them. It’s no wonder that a form of poetry would emerge to reject it, just as philosophy was recognizing its ubiquity.

But is the intention behind this defamiliarization method enough to vindicate the Poet’s vocation? Well, that’s strictly rhetorical (poets can do what they want with their lives, after all), but the question here pertains as to whether the Martian technique itself is inherently self-limiting or not. My answer is that it is, and mostly because it uses metaphoric techniques that fall short of its founding ambition to renew the world. When you read a line such as “Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings” (v. 1) for the first time, you do have the exact intended reaction of perplexed entrance into a fantasy world: What are ‘Caxtons’? How can a bird possibly be ‘mechanical’? Or even have ‘many wings’? But how interesting it is to imagine such a creature as it first appears in your mind’s eye… But when, after reading the next few lines of description or after rereading the poem having acquired the skeleton key to its imagery, you realize that a Caxton is nothing but a book- ‘mechanically’ inanimate and with many pages in the place of ‘wings’- you’d be forgiven for your slight touch of disappointment. The truth is that the referents of the poem’s lines are not ambiguous in themselves; the “haunted apparatus” (v. 19) is ‘only’ a baby, the “punishment room” (v’ 26) is just a funny misinterpretation of what happens in a lavatory, and the “film/ to watch for anything missed” (v. 15-16) in a car – a little trickier- is simply the images in the rearview mirror. These are riddles with definitive answers, but the usual joy of a solution is subsumed here by the letdown of the image’s confinement to reality’s details. Even when the technique is reversed (when it’s stated that “Mist is when the sky is tired of flight” (v. 7) for example) the effect is not of an enhancement on reality but a demonstration of the plasticity of descriptive terms. As such, the metaphors in this ‘Martian’ poem only function as adornments to other, plainer descriptions and thus have the inescapable feeling of kitsch- of an excess of expression in an effort to impress. The irony is that Raine actually can escape when he wants to. Witness just two lines of an earlier poem on childhood memories of a neighbourhood ice-cream man: “he worked with hairy deaf and dumb hands/ agile as a pair of courting spiders” (Raine, 2000: 9. ‘The Ice Cream Man’ v.7- 8).

Where does this swing towards kitsch originate? I’d have to agree with my tutor that, in effect, the title ‘ruins it’. Claiming, whether in self-conscious jest or not, that the litany of the poem could comprise the contents of an extraterrestrial missive implies a terrible bathos for the figure of the objective gaze. We already know it’s the poet himself who is masquerading as the ultimate stranger (and isn’t poetry itself the essential domain of subjectivity anyway?). So why does Raine consecrate his defamiliarization technique by such an appeal to the truly defamiliarized (and necessarily non-existent) subject when all he’s presenting is a string of very human observations on the kinds of modern ‘oddness’ only an in-the-world poet would take the time to compile? It’s a bad act and we realize it while we’re reading. By anchoring such a meaning to his depictions, Raine depends on a false authority to ensure the value of his own metaphors. And if we don’t believe in the authority- as we shouldn’t- the metaphors themselves, quite naturally, take on a stilted look, like unformed sketches of psychedelic similes e.g. “a key is turned to free the world” (v. 14) sounds particularly strange when stated by a fake alien.1 All of which is particularly disappointing because the reader’s initial encounter with the poem promises such an interestingly altered perspective on the world- if not a new one. Then again, what sounds good on paper doesn’t always sound good again on paper…

‘The poet is the Martian’ would have been a nice title for this essay if it weren’t a little too on-the-nose or too much of a slogan. It does sum up my thesis here that overt defamiliarization is more of a ruse than a breakthrough in this poem and it indicates Raine’s underlying failure of nerve. Instead of just a framing-device, I think the concept of Martianism should have been a call of allegiance, the way Romanticism was embodied by Keats and Shelley as a direct celebration of nature. Why shouldn’t postmodern (or post-postmodern, if you like) poetry seek to embody its own principles of decentralization? Why can’t the world just be beautifully strange without the metaphors of a fictional Martian to remind us so? Perhaps this is the real difference between the ‘poetic lens’ and the poetic temperament: the former alters the look of the world to create a comfortable impression of the other while the latter changes the world itself so as to alter the way we look at the other that was always already inside ourselves. Martianism, sadly, never really threatens to make the leap.

Word Count: 1635

Reference List:

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1979. Jean-Francois Lyotard- Quotes. Available:

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-francois-lyotard/quotes/ [2014, August 16] Raine, Craig. 2000. Collected Poems 1978-1999. London: Picador.

1There’s also the too-literal notion of using an alien to ‘alienate’ the reader, but I guess you have to have some kind of gimmick in order to start writing a poem…