Making Strange: how to write captivating poetry | National Centre for Writing | NCW

One of the challenges of being a poet is to grab and maintain your reader's attention. Attention is a rare commodity these days when information comes flying in constantly through the blue light of our screens. How do you seize the whole of a person's focus, if only for the few minutes it takes to read a poem? How would you entice them to come back into your world and sit still with your poem for a second, or perhaps multiple times? One of the ways is to appeal to the imagination is by shaking things up a bit - you make the reader see something in a way they have never seen it before.