Silence seems a paradoxical and perhaps daunting theme for writers, yet it strikes me as tantalizingly hospitable too. A common element is assurance and presence, the sense of a person thinking through the poem – and of the poem thinking through the person. Precision, energy, surprise and an unlikely angle were other touchstones. Feeling, too, of course; silence, actual or metaphoric, can certainly be neutral, but more often it affects us either negatively or positively: as nothingness, dread, loss, denial and oppression, or else as affirmation, safety, intuitive understanding, intimacy, transcendence, and so on. For me, as for many of those submitting, the theme summons up death – the lost voices – but also a sense of mysterious imminence and immanence.
In speaking of silence, do we destroy it or affirm it? Shape it or dialogue with it? In everyday terms, the word ‘silence’ denotes an absence of sound-waves as translated by the ear, but instinct and intellect both strive to sound its mystery, for it’s a wild thing, a hybrid of actual absence and metaphorical presence. Pascal experienced the immensity of silence and infinite space as one overpowering concept. Edmond Jabès, also writing from a theological viewpoint, spoke of ‘the infinite nothingness that is the secret, silent essence of words.’ He did attempt the unnameable though, just as his friend Celan tackled the unspeakable. Other post-Holocaust poets such as Różewicz and Herbert sculpted their minimalist irony from a bleak grey silence. The postmodernists exploring the echo chamber of language based their poetics on the secret resources of silence, and even though the fact of the signifier being forever cut off from the signified is tinged with anxiety for some, it is, after all, what gives us room to think and freedom to create.
Silence.
The theme offers so many possibilities, from algebra and aphasia to witches and whistle-blowers, from the moment of birth to the night silence, galaxies deep. How privileged we are as poets; for writing, as Paul Kane says, ‘is giving voice to silence.’ And silence giving voice to us.
