ABSTRACT
Jeanette Winterson understands that “the language of a poet” uses “rhythm not logic as its anchor”. When language arrives at its own edge, what it finds is not a positivity that contradicts it, but the void that will efface it. Into that void it must go, consenting to come undone in the rumbling, in the immediate negation of what it says, in a silence that is not the intimacy of a secret but a pure outside where words endlessly unravel. The chapter discusses poems that comprise a body of writing that pays attention to breathing, rhythm, vitality. It invites the reader to meander, to read slowly, to rest in her or his body, to listen to the rhythms of the poet's corpus full of lively celebration and interrogation and exclamation and imagination. Through a poem, the chapter sense of temporary closure while also opening up other possibilities for knowing, becoming, revealing, and playing.
