The Art of Losing Your Balance
...on Purpose
#Field Notes
Dear Writers,
Poetic disorientation isn’t confusion for its own sake — it’s a way of letting the uncertainty inside a moment become the moment’s deepest truth.
Sometimes a poem’s power comes not from clarity, but from the way it unsettles us. Disorientation in poetry is a deliberate technique that slows the reader down, shifts the ground under their feet, and invites them into a moment where certainty hasn’t yet hardened.
When a poem tilts its perspective, fractures its logic, or leaps unexpectedly from one image to another, it activates a heightened sense of attention. We lean in. We recalibrate. We feel our way through the moment rather than think our way out of it. Disorientation becomes a form of discovery, a way for the poem to reveal emotional or psychological truth that linear sense-making would flatten.
Disorientation can happen through:
disrupted logic
unusual syntax
sudden leaps in image
contradictory emotional tones
blurred or fragmentary description
a perspective that tilts or distorts
misplaced chronology
unexpected scale or proximity
visual ambiguity in the frame
The key is that the poem becomes a site of recalibration, where the reader has to do a tiny bit of balancing to stay inside the moment.
