Unknowing a Fork

Surely it's impossible to write of a familiar object like the fork without employing all the language and memories and feelings and pre-conceived ideas that you have about that object? It is a familiar object - it is a fork - it is the epitome of your every day breakfast, lunch and dinner table. It encompasses years and years of what you were taught, of what you learned and what you know. To write about a fork it is nigh on impossible not to evoke its forkiness. To apply the principle of ostranenie is possible - making us look at the fork in a new light - but it is still the fork we know, just viewed from a different perspective.  You can't unknow a fork once you know one (unless you have Alzheimer's or a memory killing crack on the head).  Forkdom is inherent within us - the only way to unknow a fork would be to time travel back to babyhood to learn a fork in all its guises for the first time.

The Magic of Existence

"It is not 'how' things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."
(Wittgenstein)

Similarly poetry doesn't seek to describe 'how' things are but the magic of their very existence. One way of doing this is ostranenie (остранение) or defamiliarizaation - the poet seek to show us something ordinary or mundane in a new way - an example of this is the poem "Fork" by Charles Simic:

Fork

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

Simic believes that "The labor of poetry is is finding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into words." (Simic, Charles, Wonderful Words, Silent Truth - Essays on Poetry and a Memoir, University of Michigan Press, 1990). I like this analogy, when I read a poem I like it to take me by surprise, to turn reality on it's head for a moment.