1
Don’t think thinking
without heart no such separation
within the acting body
takes a step without all of it the self
propelled into doing the
thing (for example, the horse) and
on the earth as well
picking up the whole circuit feet first feel
the waves tidal and even
outside to moon and sun it’s OK
to notate only one of
those things without knowing fixed
anyway some heart sits in
the arms of
Having
appeared as a thread through his work, including through multiple full-length
poetry titles, is
Vancouver poet Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking
(Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020), a new volume collecting the one hundred and
seventy numbered poems in this sequence-to-date for the first time. The first
ten poems in the sequence, as Wah’s notes acknowledge, were “written for and
published in an issue of
Open Letter (5.7 [Spring 1984]) on notation,” a
project originally prompted by
bpNichol and
Frank Davey (
there are at least
three Open Letter issues “on notation”). The original handful of poems
might have been prompted by an idea on notation, but the poems quickly evolved
into a sequence of responses, whether composed as individual pieces or short
groupings of pieces, to music, visual art, theory and poetry. The first
sixty-nine pieces later appeared as
Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red
Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987), with a subsequent thirty-five appearing
as part of
Alley Alley Home Free (Red Deer College Press, 1992). Subsequent
pieces collected in the volume originally emerged through numerous literary journals,
festschrifts, anthologies and further of his trade titles, existing as a thread
across the length and breadth of his work since, encompassing nearly forty
years of composition. There is something fascinating about a poetry title composed
across four decades, especially one that emerges out of a particular thread
excised from the rest of his work. How does this one thread exist in relation
to other pieces he’s worked on, across that same period? Perhaps at some point
down the road, a similar volume might compile
Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days,”
another sequence of poems focusing equally on “response” as well as an
attention to form, language and breath. To pull out and compile a single thread,
what is the portrait that might emerge? As Wah writes to introduce those original
pieces in
Open Letter:
THE FOLLOWING ‘DRUNK’
WRITINGS ARE NOTES FOR TALK. IN THE explication of these estranged pieces lies
possible coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as
feeling. The difficulty is literal and intentional. I’m wary of any attempt to
make it easy. ‘language [the true practice of thought]’ Kristeva says or Jack
writing yesterday with reminders all through his letter, mind stumbling over
itself not recognizing stuff ‘till later,
That last part of your
letter makes me remember Wittgenstein’s saying ‘don’t think, look.’ And if the ‘dogmatic
order’ is only in the para-text of perception, then … the syntax of thinking in
its (linguistic) periodicity is always going to elide that bump or ‘nipple’
Juan de la Cosa’s eyes included (but you’d have this already from Henry Lee and
Benjamin L.).
And then the gates open to
the ‘double,’ the binary. Emic. Dialogic.
In
many ways, Wah’s “Music at the Heart of Thinking” is built in a manner opposite
to a project such as Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s impossibly-large and ongoing
“Love in a Dry Land”: where Cooley’s is a single project nearly thirty years in
the making, with threads excerpted for book publication, Wah’s appears as a
single, occasional and ongoing thread. His is a sequence of occasionals sprung
from a shared impulse of improvisation and response; a project that adds poems
as they are needed, potentially for as long as he requires them. The idea of “drunk
writings” he mentions in his original introduction, is something he referred to
in that first trade volume as “drunken tai chi,” the idea of a master craftsman
deliberately compromised, forcing themselves to work more intuitively, and allowing
the unconscious to take over. In the note at the back of the current
collection, he continues that particular thread, writing that “The ‘MHTs’ became,
for me, a niche for a compositional attention I wanted to explore in particular
ways. I had been attracted to the prose poem through my attempts at the utanikki,
the poetic journal. Within the prose poem I was interested in upsetting the
tyranny of the sentence as a unit of composition. The resistance to closure and
syntactic predictability implicit in contesting the sentence is a dynamic also
shared with the long poem.” As his opening note to the current volume, “One
makes (the) difference,” begins:
To say: “I don’t understand
what this means,” is, at least, to recognize that “this” means. The problem is
that meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability. Within each word,
each sentence, meaning has slipped a little out of sight and all we have are
traces, shadows, still warm ashes. The meaning available from language goes
beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a
labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, a place that offers
more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want to
know. It isn’t a container, static and apparent. Rather, it is noisy,
frequently illegible. Reading into meaning starts with a questioning glance, a
seemingly obvious doubloon on a mast.
The
“Music at the Heart of Thinking” poems, a project that emerged out of Wah’s
attention to improvisation and response [something we discussed as part of an
interview I conducted with Wah for Jacket2], appears to be the thread of
his work where he more overtly explores the possibilities of improvisation alongside
ekphrastic movement, allowing the poems a looseness, and trusting them to land
as they should. Set together for the first time, the ebb and flow of the series
is interesting, as the poems expand and contract, reach out and retreat; from
compact prose poems to sentence-stanzas, exploring both the breath-line and the
poetic sentence. “The plateau of the poem,” he writes, to open “127,” “pulling
a story from a fire / smouldering under foot / on a periphery of words / as
things while sentenced [.]” The series also evolves from more general explorations
to specific responses, whether to specific people, artworks or thinking, such
as “Music at the Heart of Thinking Eighty-Something,” after Christine Stewart, that
includes: “Where to go to get the word rubble now or as you say fair /
producing sky weather may eventually.” Wah’s has always been a poetic simultaneously
engaged with breath and quick thought, language and deep meditation on being, identity
and theory, and Music at the Heart of Thinking provides an ongoing
example of just how powerful a master can be, even as he allows himself the
quick line, the quick sketch; allowing himself to relax, and let go.
90
On the weekend I got into
anger talk about landscape and the hunger of narrative to eat answer or time
but space works for me because place got to be more spiritual at least last
felt now this water/genetic I suspect passions like anger suprafixed to simply
dwells I mean contained as we speak of it believe me I’d like to find a new word-track
for feeling but language and moment work out simply as simultaneous occurrences
so I don’t think you should blame words for time-lapse tropism e.g. ethics is
probably something that surrounds you like your house it’s where you live
