On ‘Making Nothing Happen’: The Apophatic Power of Poetry and the Poetic Power of Silence

Abstract

This essay suggests that the apophatic mode of theology and spirituality is especially well illuminated when brought into conversation with poetry’s rhetorical power to make ‘no-thing’ happen. By attending to poetry’s theological horizons, especially by what Michael Symmons Roberts calls poetry’s ’semi-sacred role’ and its capacity to embody silence and space, I shall suggest that it is possible to come to a richer understanding of God’s transcendent elusiveness.