AustLit

'Taking the form of a lyric essay, this paper reflects on innate synergies between apophasis and the poetic process, situated within a discussion of writing and dispossession, and points out the inherent (and for a writer) apparently insurmountable irony at the heart of apophasis. Apophasis is the term for the rhetoric of negation. It is derived from the Greek words phanai 'to say' and a prefix 'apo' which in this use means 'away from' (Gibbons, 2007). For many centuries, writers across the disciplines of philosophy, theology and poetry have traditionally used apophasis when attempting to “speak of” concepts or phenomena that either resist language or lie beyond human knowledge, such as the Divine. I engage with the issue of being 'lost to and for words,' both from a phenomenological and poetic perspective, and I reflect on how coming up against the limitsof language is, for the poet, at once desirable and problematic. Drawing from ancient and contemporary literary and theological texts such as The Mystical Theology by Pseudo-Dionsyius, the poetry of Rumi, and the writings of Alice Notley, among others, I argue that being 'lost to and for words' is a form of dispossession, though of whom, and by what, is open to conjecture. I propose apophasis as a useful framework within which to survey this conundrum, describing how it offers to a writer the potential for surprising and unexpectedly rich poetic and critical outcomes.'

Source: Abstract.