Aporia: Toward a Poetics of Questioning

Poems are often bewildering. Perhaps it’s their engagement with missingness that makes them so, or maybe it’s the suspicion cultivated in schools that poems are conniving creatures, each line a hiding place for esoteric “meaning.” The objective of this workshop was to dismantle this notion and to embrace poems as tokens of the unknown, as encounters with different types of missingness. To do this, we considered how we can use questions with precision and intention, to drive movement and create intimacy or distance with our reader. 

Aporia comes from ancient Greek, meaning (a) “without,” (poria) “passage”: impassable, without passage, impasse. This meaning has evolved over time, and the term has been adopted by philosophic and literary theorists to indicate a moment when a text’s logic collapses on itself. But, for the purpose of my workshop, we understood aporia as an expression of doubt in poetry, sometimes genuine, sometimes feigned, and often taking the form of a question.

When applying aporia to poetry, we can look for moments where meaning seems suspended: where questions are posed without resolution, when the speaker is caught in uncertainty or paradox, or when a limit is reached or exposed. I’m drawn to thinking about aporia in relation to poetry because, though impasse represents blockage, with that comes the possibility of passage; poems are spaces that we can enter and move through. 

Here are the workshop’s driving questions:

• What, to you personally, is the relationship between poetry and questioning?
• Do you find yourself returning to a single or set of questions in your own work? What are these obsessions?
• Can we create our own spectrum of questioning? Ranging from questions that make us vulnerable to questions that assert power?
• Do we want our poems to be passable or impassable? What might these two opposites look/feel like in a poem? 

Jack Underwood’s essay on “Uncertain Subjects” served as our starting point. His wonderful essay considers it the poet’s duty to explore the unknown, and to see not knowing as the advancement of knowing:

Writing poems you don’t just look up from your computer screen every so often and remind yourself that endless reinterpretation threatens to destabilise each of the terms you are using, or that those terms are calibrated and reliant upon endless further terms [...] Instead, you deliberately build your poem as an open habitation; you have to learn to leave holes in the walls, because you won’t and can’t be around later on to clear up any ambiguities when the lakes of your readers’ lives come flooding up through the floor

Like Underwood, I believe that poems are inherently mysterious. Interpretation proliferates from sound, rhythm, punctuation, font size, white space, all of it competing with whatever it is the poem is “saying” in words. Questions themselves can be sites of paradox: they can signify an impasse, where the speaker of the poem has reached a limit; but they also puncture a hole in the surface of the poem, rendering your poem an open habitation, inviting the reader inside. 

To see these ideas in action, we searched for moments of aporia in four different poems, each of which ended with a question. I encourage you to spend time with these poems, experiencing their questions as points of entry, before approaching the writing prompts at the end of this essay. 

1. “Riddle,” by Jericho Brown
2. “Naming the Heartbeats,” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
3. “Question,” by May Swenson
4. “Lying on the Floor in the Supermarket,” by Jack Underwood

I hoped that these four poems would demonstrate aporia operating on different levels—exposing ethical, linguistic, existential, and emotional limits. Rather than attempting to answer the questions, we experienced them, and asked what their answerlessness revealed. 

So now, I invite you to participate in a freewrite to generate a question-bank for your own poems. Each prompt draws from the poems above:

1. Inspired by Jericho Brown’s “Riddle,”come up with questions using one syllable words. Aim to provoke, accuse, or sting your reader.
2. Using Nezhukumatathil’s question as a template (But what is it called when _____?), come up with as many questions as you can in three minutes.
3. Inspired by May Swenson’s “Question,”address question(s) to your body—what relationship do these questions expose?
4. Drawing from Jack Underwood’s dream logic in “Lying on the Floor in the Supermarket” (what would all that milk look like emptied down a marble staircase?), come up with dream-scene questions: the playful, the surreal, the impossible-to-imagine. 

Revision Prompt

Finally, return to an old poem, one that you haven’t looked at in a good while. Use the following questions to revise the poem:

1. Read the poem several times, aloud and in your head. Then, close your eyes, and see what questions arise. They might be relating specifically to the poem, or they may be more associative. Write these down.
2. Consider, is there a question latent in the formal qualities of this poem?
3. What limits do you find yourself approaching as you move through this draft?
4. If you could rewrite this poem only in questions, what would they be?
5. Could a question be used to befriend or push away the reader?

Drawing on your responses to the questions above, redraft the poem, finishing with a question. 

Once you’re satisfied, take a moment to reflect on your creative process. Do you write to ask or to answer? Is it possible to separate these impulses? What insights have you gained about the relationship between poetry and questioning? What might the world look like if questions became contraband items?