Poetry is all details. It's physiological. Poetry is breath, and poetry is perception. Schlovsky writes about the technique in art of defamiliarizing the familiar and slowing perception. He also applies this to poetry. Here are excerpts of Victor Schlovsky's essay "Art as Technique:"
And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. 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. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object…
In my article on plot construction I write about defamiliarization in psychological parallelism. Here, then, I repeat that the perception of disharmony in a harmonious context is important in parallelism. The purpose of parallelism, like the general purpose of imagery, is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of new perception - that is, to make a unique semantic modification.
In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words, and in the characteristic thought structures compounded-from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark - that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism or perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception. A work is created "artistically" so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception. As a result of this lingering, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to speak, in its continuity. Thus "poetic language" gives satisfaction. According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful; and, in fact, it is often actually foreign: the Sumerian used by the Assyrians, the Latin of Europe during the Middle Ages, the Arabisms of the Persians, the Old Bulgarian of Russian literature, or the elevated, almost literary language of folksongs. The language of, poetry is, then, a difficult, roughened, impeded language.As Schlovsky writes, "...the general purpose of imagery is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of new perception," and "the language of poetry...is a difficult, roughened, impeded language." This brings to mind the multitude of object poems and figurative techniques that take imaginative leaps. Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" comes to mind with the lines
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit.
And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power.
. . . . . . . .
This is a torso only, and yet the eyes are like ripening fruit, and the gaze "gleams in all its power." It is not entirely strange to refer to an all-knowing, all-seeing god, but the sense of perception coming from the marble statue is wonderful and unsettling. Aren't museums and statues meant to be seen and not seeing? The up-ended expectation reverses the direction of perception. This creates a shift in self-perception, in consciousness: a knowledge of being seen by Apollo. The narrator can no longer bear his old way of being. He speaks not in second person point of view as if the force of encounter has already removed him from the "I." The poem ends with the memorable lines "for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life." The repeated words "you. You..." are nearly stuttering. This new vision, mentioned by Schlovsky, or a "semantic modification" has haunting results.
Read the entire essay at
https://paradise.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/Viktor_Sklovski_Art_as_Technique.pdf
Read Rilke's poem at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/archaic-torso-apollo
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