For Tuesday, October 26, in anticipation of Halloween, bring pieces that explore weird effects, and/or pieces in which weird things happen, things that deviate from the usual laws of reality.

Significant contrast among discrete poetic elements can create a weird effect. W.H. Auden’s “Oh Where Are you Going,” for instance, pairs a rollicking, happy-sounding meter and rhyme pattern with unsettling, dissonant imagery; working together, these contrasting elements create a physical torque.

Another kind of weird contrast can be seen in many brief narrative poems by Mark Strand, in which outlandishly bizarre events are relayed in understated, matter-of-fact language, and in which an action’s consequences deviate from expectations subtly but significantly. Examples of these include “The Dreadful Has Already Happened,” and “Man and Camel.”

Weird, “unreal” pieces like Strand’s, Auden’s, and others are pleasing and powerful not because they offer escapist fantasies– they don’t offer those. Despite their weirdness, the pieces include the stuff of real life: libraries, marching bands, trains, eyeglasses, relationship troubles. These pieces’ unreal worlds overlap with the everyday world. Not offering an escape from real injustice, hardship, sorrow, they explore experience from new angles and help us learn about our actual selves, our actual world.