Poetics of Naming

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

“This text arises from an experience in which language disappeared,
when consciousness of time and space formed by language lapsed, exposing
the psyche to an alinguistic universe,” says George Melnyk; and one of
the frustrations of this little book that attempts to construct a
poetics of what transcends language is his refusal to say anything more
about what that experience was. But that’s not his purpose; rather,
Poetics of Naming seeks to guide its readers to a philosophical
understanding of this experience, which Melnyk names “poesis.”

In one sense, Poetics of Naming is a “translation,” as Melnyk puts
it, of his own 28-year-old master’s thesis, “Metaphor and
Interpretation,” a study of Heidegger, in full awareness of all that
had been written along those lines since, by such other postmodernist
philosophers as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard. Sadly, Melnyk does not
seem to have gone to their work, but rather to some of their
interpreters, so that his updating of his own work is not as thorough as
it might have been. Since he is still thinking about metaphor and how it
is the only way we can even approach poesis, I think it would have been
especially useful had he taken a look at Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy
(1992) and Wisdom and Metaphor (2003), both of which delve deeply into
the very questions he confronts here.

There is much of interest in Poetics of Naming, but it’s very hard
going to get at the kernels of vision it contains, due mostly to a style
that comes across as a kind of translation of really thick German
philosophese. If only Melnyk had written closer to the experience that
generated the thinking in these pages, he might have written a truly
poetic study of poetic language and what it can do.