Defamiliarization
Quick answer: Defamiliarization is the technique of presenting ordinary things strangely so readers see them fresh. Learn the theory and how poets apply it well.
Defamiliarization is the technique of describing familiar things in an unfamiliar way, so that readers perceive them freshly instead of merely recognising them. The Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky named the idea in 1917, calling it ostranenie, roughly 'making strange'. His argument was that habit deadens perception: we stop seeing a kettle, a commute, a marriage. Art exists, he said, to recover the sensation of life, and it does so by slowing perception down and making the ordinary difficult again.
For poets this is close to a job description. Most poems are about common experiences, love, grief, weather, dishes, and the only way to make the millionth love poem land is to make love look briefly like something never seen before.
How It Works
The core move is to withhold the automatic label and describe the thing as if you had no word for it. A perspective shift does this: an object seen by a child, an alien, an animal, or a bereaved person stops being its label and becomes its details. Odd comparisons do it too, as does treating a process we ignore, like swallowing or falling asleep, in slow forensic detail.
An invented micro-example: instead of 'I answered the phone', a defamiliarized line might run, 'I lifted the small lit slab that carries voices of the absent, and held it against my skull.' Clumsy in prose, but in a poem about distance it makes a daily gesture strange enough to feel again.
Where You Will See It
Shklovsky's own favourite example was Tolstoy, who narrates an opera or a flogging as if the custom had never been explained to him. In poetry, Craig Raine's 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' built a whole movement, nicknamed Martian poetry, out of describing books, cars, and telephones through alien eyes. Emily Dickinson defamiliarizes constantly, rendering a snake as 'a narrow fellow' and death as a courteous carriage driver, and Gerard Manley Hopkins' compound coinages make even sunlight read as new.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Choose one ordinary object or ritual per poem and slow it down; defamiliarizing everything at once produces noise. Ban the object's name from the draft and see what the description must do instead. Precision matters more than weirdness: the strange description must still be accurate, or the reader feels tricked rather than awakened.
This is also a reliable revision tool. When a draft feels flat, find the most automatic phrase in it and rewrite that phrase as if you had never heard it. Judges scoring creativity, on Writory's panel as anywhere, are usually responding to exactly this quality: the familiar made newly visible.
What poets can take from this
- Pick one familiar thing per poem to make strange; leave the rest plain.
- Try banning the object's name from your draft entirely.
- Stay accurate: strangeness that distorts the thing breaks trust.
- Borrow an unusual point of view, a child, an outsider, an object itself.
- Use defamiliarization in revision to replace your most automatic phrases.
Try it yourself
Describe a household appliance in a 10-line poem without using its name or its usual verbs. Write as if reporting it to someone from the year 1400, then give the final line to what the appliance replaces in human effort or memory.
Questions
What is the difference between defamiliarization and imagery?
Imagery is any language that appeals to the senses; defamiliarization is a purpose you can give imagery. An image can be comfortably familiar, but a defamiliarizing image is built to disrupt recognition and force fresh perception.
Who invented the term defamiliarization?
Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian Formalist critic, introduced the concept as ostranenie in his 1917 essay 'Art as Technique'. He argued that art's purpose is to make the stone stony again, recovering perception dulled by habit.
Can defamiliarization make a poem confusing?
It can, if the strange description stops being accurate or if everything in the poem is made strange at once. The technique works best when the reader can eventually recognise the thing and feel the shock of seeing it new.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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