marvel super hero squad online rewritten

MARVEL SUPER HERO SQUAD ONLINE REWRITTEN SERIES

Van Jordan‘s Quantum Lyrics (2007) begins with a poem about the Flash, continues in the voice of the Green Lantern (“I don’t run to or away from the light: / I am the light”), and proceeds to five poems about the Atom, a physicist who can shrink to any size. Krypton Nights seems to have been the first book of poems dominated by comic book superheroes, but it is no longer the only one.

MARVEL SUPER HERO SQUAD ONLINE REWRITTEN SERIES

In it themes familiar to Superman’s fans find sometimes virtuosic expression: Is Superman Jewish? Is the destruction of his home planet, Krypton, a metaphor for the Holocaust? Can we save our own planet from environmental disaster, as Jor-El (Superman’s father) could not save his planet, “when the last Krypton night simmers over / the rim of your world”? If we seek salvation from the more-than-human, from the fantastic, from figures outside the law, have we given up on any collective attempt to govern ourselves? “It’s Superman who’s broken the social / contract,” the supervillain Lex Luthor warns us “already he goes to prepare a plot / for you.” Dietrich also writes a crown of sonnets spoken by Clark Kent, a series of verse “transcripts” spoken by Jor-El over the radio just before Krypton explodes, and seven poems in the voice of Lois Lane. All the poems in Bryan Dietrich’s first book, Krypton Nights (2001 note the pun on “kryptonites”) have to do with Superman. Then there are whole books about superheroes. (Armantrout entitles the poem “America.”) Iron Man thinks he is blameless (one meaning for “innocent”) though really he lacks experience (another meaning): by believing he does only good, he may do great harm. “More innocent” should sound almost sarcastic. Now, more powerful and more innocent than ever before, he attacks. “He will believe he is the one hero,” this Robin says “I must remember to wince when I feel his fangs.” Chad Parmenter speaks, in more recent sonnets, for Batman’s alter ego, Bruce Wayne, who grew up (like Robert Lowell) around old money, amid impossible and superannuated models of masculinity, “where suits of armor rusted to their swords.” From such decor, from the murder of both his parents, from the powers he acquired to avenge them, and from the criminals he fought, Batman learned that the perfect man was a death machine: my neck a toothsome feeding ground.” This Batman makes explicit the subtext that (as Will Brooker has demonstrated) haunted the Dynamic Duo for decades: he molests his ward, who secretly enjoys it. Powell’s Tea (1998) includes a “song of Robin” that makes the Dark Knight dark indeed: “don’t be fooled by costumes,” Powell’s Robin says, “I am still an orphan I move through his house by stealth. Despite work by Ian Gregson, Jo Shapcott, and other British writers, most subsequent poems about superheroes are American. The same poem-still well known (as poems go) in Britain today-also announced the new plausibility of superheroes as subjects. well, I’ve turned the corner.Īrmitage’s poem announced its independence from any stuffy, paternally sanctioned poetic tradition, as Robin announced his independence from Batman, even while it embraced parts of that tradition-not just meter, but subgenre (dramatic monologue), and even Romantic inheritance: “Kid” is a late-Romantic poem of vocation, analogous in some ways to Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and to Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” “I’m the real boy wonder,” Robin concludes: the poem announced, with tongue not quite in cheek, Armitage’s own arrival in British letters, as a sort of boy wonder-brash, young, technically proficient, unignorable-a reputation Armitage did, in fact, gain. Armitage had been an English probation officer, trying to keep young toughs on the right track, and some of those young toughs turned up in his other work, but the kid in “Kid” was Robin, proclaiming his emancipation from Batman, and from his juvenile costume, in ostentatiously regular trochaic pentameter: One of the first such poems to get much attention was the title poem in Simon Armitage’s second collection, Kid (1992). By that time, comic book superheroes had already become, for more than one poet, appropriate subjects for serious poems. Something similar happened, a bit later, to the literary novel: Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible, Tom DeHaven’s It’s Superman!, and Andrew Kaufman’s All My Friends Are Superheroes (all published since 1999) testify to a new legitimacy, not for comics as a medium, but for superheroes-the kind invented in and for comic books-as viable characters, in ambitious fiction made of words alone.

Sometime after 1985, something happened to make, or let, poets pay attention to comic book superheroes.

Marvel super hero squad online rewritten