ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. This is a book of conversations: spoken, unspoken, and yet-to-be-spoken conversations between analysts and their patients; imaginary and real conversations; wordless conversations between poets and the poems they make, and between poems and the readers they make. It also includes conversations between feelings and thoughts, and between thoughts and words; conversations between the inexpressible and the expressible, a distance mediated by metaphor, by the sounds and cadences of words and sentences, and by images and gestures. The book comprises of the conversation between people, reader and writer, a conversation that derives life from all of the other conversations, and imparts life to them. It presents a sense of how living at the frontier of dreaming is not only an art, but the lifeblood of art itself.
