The music of thinking. The thinking of music. Music at the Heart of
Thinking is a poetry that works through language as the true practice
of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates
thinking. From jazz, the unpredictable ad lib driving itself from
itself. From a drunken Shaolin monk, the poem as imbalanced tai chi.
From Keats's negative capability, the half-closed eye, the estrangement
of language. All intended to bump beyond the end of the word into focus.
As a response to readings in contemporary texts, art, and ideas. Music
at the Heart of Thinking relocates critical language and thinking to
the poetic bavardage at the heart of such endeavours. The poetics that
generates these texts arises out of a lifelong poem project that has its
roots in the long poem genre of the '80s and its interest in the
resistance to closure and the containment of meaning characteristic of
the lyric. This book continues the work of two previous out-of-print
publications, Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987) and Alley, Alley
Home Free (1990). The poems are generated as textual responses in the
reading, looking, and listening of the poet's attention to his cultural
milieu. Thus the writing addresses contemporary texts and art over the
past forty years. Within this poetry of estrangement lie possible
coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as
feeling. The difficulty of this writing is literal and intentional, wary
of any attempt to make thinking simple, easy, or predictable.
