Melissa Kwasny
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

This idea has led me into a decades-long obsession with what I call the visionary properties of the natural image, by which I mean anything alive to which I am called: aspen, deer, rock of rosy quartz. I call the method “Talking into the Image,” a process that involves meditation, dreaming, observation, and allowance, and owes much to the writings of others, including the Sufi concept of “the creative imagination,” a play of inner and outer, spiritual and material on which any dialogue depends. The Syrian poet Adonis writes that the image is “not a style but a vision that calls for completion, figurative language as a kind of question that propels us toward an answer.” The poem is one site where I can engage with and have a conversation with these other voices, where I “give them voice” by opening the door to a kind of hearing that continues past the initial conversation.

You once evoked the phrase “faith-in-progress” when describing different processes of a “work-in-progress,” as well as the need for trust in an image, in a feeling and the progress of the process. What helps you in nurturing this trust, and in keeping alive this faith consistently?

Corbin, again, is a teacher here. He writes that “there’s a divine response without which Prayer would not be an intimate dialogue.” Response is what nourishes and builds faith, whether one feels the response comes from the divine or a sprig of kinnikinnick. And poetry, I believe, is a form of prayer, a calling out to the other and a careful listening for response. On the other hand, one must be comfortable with no response. As poet Rusty Morrison writes in the anthology One Word, one must allow “for the lack of echo” as a step in preparing room for the unknown.

The poem is one site where I can engage with and have a conversation with these other voices, where I ‘give them voice’ by opening the door to a kind of hearing that continues past the initial conversation.

My saying “faith-in-progress” is a way of saying what Robert Duncan said better: “Poetry reveals itself to us as we obey the orders that appear in our work.” It is also what I think Carl Jung meant when he said we must strive for, “an obedience to awareness.”

I also wanted to distinguish between the modern faith in scientific or capitalistic progress toward the betterment of mankind and a faith in the progress of the imagination, which involves a number of external and internal operations. This winter, during all the upheavals all over the world, and minor ones, like the tea party take over of our legislature here in Montana, who are gutting all environmental protections, I felt closed off from all sources of inspiration. It’s not that they weren’t there. They were just closed to me. I asked, before I went to sleep one night, what I was to do about it. When I woke the next morning, the words, “Porous, not trapped” were on the edge of my waking, and I realized that the body, the rocks, the earth are porous, have pores. Through them, we move in and out, breathing, exchanging, often in silence, without words.