Telling rhythm

by Amittai F. Aviram

In an era when poetry as a cultural force in the West appears to be waning, Telling Rhythm presents a hopeful and invigorating new approach to reading and interpreting poetry. At the same time, the book reviews a tradition of theorizing about poetry and suggests some innovations in literary theory itself that point to new ways of thinking about poetic texts. Telling Rhythm takes rhythm, rather than meaning, as its starting point in reading poetry. Rhythm has traditionally been conceived as poetry's secondary property, as a device to strengthen the expression of meaning. Aviram suggests instead that the meaning of poetry, its thematic, content and images, express rhythm - that is, poetry can be read as an allegory of the sublime power of rhythm to manifest the physical world to us. It is thus a way of infusing words with a power that is not itself in words, a way of saying the ineffable. At the same time, the paradox of representing "the unrepresentably physical" challenges the socially