I learned this, too, from Char, how he took his images from both the violence of the French resistance and the beauty of his rural village of Vaucluse, as well as from his dreams. He wrote, in his beautiful war notebook Leaves of Hypnos, that this kind of language “comes from the sense of wonder communicated by the beings and things we live with in continual intimacy.” It gave me permission to place flowers, a film, global warming, and the fact that Saddam Hussein saved scraps from his bread to feed the birds when he was imprisoned all in the same poem. The fact that the person who fed birds and the person who murdered thousands of people exist in the same body is somehow moving to me. I remember Helen Vendler, writing about Char, saying, “he writes with absolute candor, but in a secret language.”

When you spoke about prose poems, you mentioned “the spacing of an image.” What is it? Can you elaborate?

I’m not sure when I said that or in what context, but my turn to writing prose poems, which began with the poems called “The Under World” at the end of Reading Novalis in Montana, was one motivated by necessity. I had already been writing what some of my readers described as poems dense with images. But in my notebooks, I noticed that I was no longer writing in lines but rather, as if in an attempt to run past the surface images that came to mind, a kind of automatic writing, a freer association wherein I found that, when I wasn’t trying to control their progression, one image would lead to another image, under or beside or through the previous one, not necessarily in logical sequence. And I noticed that an image would often lead to a statement or question, as if the image itself had its own question, its own sphere of intelligence, which would not explain the one before but propel me to the next association.

I was fascinated by this movement. It didn’t tell a story. It created worlds of images that led me deeper and deeper into their worlds. (Corbin calls the image itself “an organ of perception.”)

You write novels and essays as well. How do you decide the generic form? (Or does the form of writing decide the subject for you?)

I haven’t written fiction for almost twenty years. When I wrote my two novels, which were published in the nineties by a feminist press, I had already been writing poetry for many years. It was a time when the rigid boundaries between fiction and poetry were becoming more fluid, and more “poetic prose” was being published. I was inspired by the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, Carole Maso, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Women writers like Susan Griffin, who wrote Women and Nature and Chorus of Stones, were publishing work that combined personal narrative, poetry, and fact-based reporting. I wanted their range and experiment. However, after publishing two novels, I realized that, experimental or not, fiction writers told stories, and I did not. I returned to poetry, where I would not force, but follow my tendencies of thought.

I have not given up my love of prose, however. If I could write like anyone alive, it would be like John Berger or W.G. Sebald or Robert Pogue Harrison, writers whose work I can’t read enough of. And there are things I want to investigate, ways of incorporating my reading and thinking that the essay form seems best for. I’ve just finished compiling a book of essays that, obsessively enough, center around the image in poetic practice. The book is called, provisionally, Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision.