AustLit

'In her latest, and strikingly titled book of poems, award-winning poet A Frances Johnson presents ‘anti-pastoral, anti-war poems’, and produces a body of work which ‘puns on the idea of a song lyric, translation, surrender and also torture’ (Melbourne Prize for Literature 2018).' (Introduction) 

'‘Poetry is an exile’s art,’ remarked American poet Charles Wright. ‘Anyone who writes it seriously writes from an exile’s point of view’ (Wright 2002: 27).

'What if a poet manages to capture not only the exile’s point of view but also the insider’s? What happens if those viewpoints converge?  In Glass, her latest collection of Australian-born, Mexico-based poet, Rose Hunter accounts for both perspectives, and limns their somewhat uneasy merger. The more miles the ‘i’ of the poems clocks up on the road and the more places she records, the less the destinations seem to matter, and the more interiorised the journey actually becomes.' (Introduction)

'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.

'This paper explores the challenge of ineffability, with a focus on prose poetry. It considers the strengths of the prose poem in offering a semantic or communicative means (Spackman 2012) of drawing closer to the unsayable, and situates this exploration in the wider context of apophasis, a centuries-old rhetorical device developed to deal, in language, with what lies beyond language. Investigating the nature and identity of prose poetry, the paper examines a prose poem by Yusef Komunyakaa, discussing its efficacy in relation to an apophatic approach to technique and form. Adopting a creative voice, and weaving prose poetry throughout the discussion, this paper also endeavours to show the overlap of creative process and practice within a research context, executed through the combination of form, idea, reflection and enquiry. In offering an amalgam of prose and poetry, the critical and the creative, this paper is not only reflecting on the situated experience of apophasis with regard to prose poetry, but also actively employing it.'  (Publication abstract)