Through art, language and therefore experience become “defamiliarized”, so we can feel and experience anew:
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”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged - Victor Shklovsky
Poetry exhibits the purest form of defamiliarization. This is because in a poem, other tasks such as telling a story, or fully and exhaustively expressing an idea, never take priority. Therefore, it is in poetry that we see most clearly and powerfully, without any other ultimate distraction, how language can be made deliberately strange, how it becomes especially “a difficult, roughened, impeded language”, in order to jar us awake. - WHY POETRY - Matthew Zapruder. page 42 - 43, Zettel 149
