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 meaningful terms in which a poem operates, thus demanding new ways of thinking.

.

This original theory is presented in the context of a theoretical tradition that starts with Nietzsche. The paradox of representing an unrepresentably physical energy is explored as a common thread in the thinking of Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Nicolas Abraham, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Telling Rhythm connects psychoanalysis to poetry in new and complex ways, as well as tracing a previously unexplored kinship between structural linguists and the Nietzchean tradition with regard to poetry.

Emphasizing interpretation as a way of discerning the relation between the represented and the unknowable, Telling Rhythm also suggests a new attitude toward knowledge itself, one that includes both the culturally specific and the ahistorical, the knowable and the unknowable. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of literary theory, poetry, comparative literature, philosophy, and popular culture, as well as to poets interested in theory.