Dianoia

MICHAEL HELLER is a poet, essayist, and critic. He is the author of twenty books, including This Constellation Is a Name, Living Root: A Memoir, Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems, and Conviction's Net of Branches, his award-winning study of the Objectivist poets. He lives in New York City.

"Full throated praise for this remarkable accomplishment . . . Michael Heller is one of our best poets and thinkers."--Anne Waldman"Dipping into language of Judaism and Buddhism, hedging his bets, Heller does not only tease out the philosophical underpinnings of his position, but in fact, recalling, enacts the actual experience: 'No place to hang one's lonely stuff. Who can be home / to this homeless light?' "--Jake Marmer "Chicago Tribune""Michael Heller's new book has the energy and urgency of a dialogue on all that most matters, a dialogue with himself, with the reader, with poets and artists (Oppen, Segalen, Basho, Beckmann, Picasso), with history and terror, with the world and its absence. Dianoia is a bristling and bracing book of unwavering attentiveness, apprehensive questioning, breathtaking clarity. It marks a further tuning of Heller's rigorous music of thought."--Geoffrey O'Brien"As usual, Michael Heller begins a conversation with his reader that I'm loath to exit until the very last words. I feel an urgency fellow-traveling with this "I" witness who has "lost my name-hunger,"as he tells us. Beset by "busyness and fear," "not feeling like myself," Heller's desire seems to have shifted from constellating names to what he calls "liquid nomination," like that of the sacred Tibetan lake, Yam-dok-Tsö, whose doubled rings escaped the first maps drawn of it. Letting singularity go for doubledness, a complex vision appears involving the "I" in often painful escape from the "armature" of the ego, its protective covering. Heller's is an almost violently honest work of rethinking--not via abandonment, ever, but by thinking across, what the Greek diá adds to noiéo- in order to produce dianoia, or "thinking that literally reaches 'across to the other side' (of a matter)." The challenge in this book is to keep up and keep our eyes open, as well as remain willing to see across to what Heller sees.--Romana Huk