Melissa Kwasny
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

You are interested in communication, and in creating work that communicates with others. How do you feel about poetry that may seem to disavow communication, instead showing more interest in “aesthetics”?

Disavow completely? I read widely in poetry, some of which could be classified as belonging to different camps — though I have to admit that I am not always aware of that — and some have doors that don’t open to me. Sometimes that is my fault: I need to pay closer attention, give it another reading. I don’t think anyone intentionally writes poetry to be uncommunicative. (Though Miles Davis turned his back on his audience, he still remained on the stage.) I find it hard to divorce the question of aesthetics from the question of what form one needs to say best the thing one wants to say. One strives for the latter first, I hope, though one strategy of that might be to make the reader engage more fully in the reading, which might look, on the surface, as a disavowal of communication. I do believe in leaving rooms open for the reader to wander in on her own.

What helps you in strengthening your inner life?

A braid of sweet grass, a yellow bowl of plums, pictographs done in red ochre, the chickadees at my feeder, spring rain. Paradoxically, the senses. “Chief inlets of Soul in this age,” as Blake said. I practice, with my lover, what we call “signs and omens.” We are often out walking in many different landscapes, in every season, in all weather, and we stop and tell each other what we smell, taste, feel, at the moment. We often try to extend our practice past the obvious and familiar, trusting our instincts. (Don’t you think it is interesting that insight, instinct, intuition, all flicker between the outer form and a pointing back to the interior?) We try to find the earth in the day, the water, air, fire in the outside. We practice cloud exercises. We play. Imagination, I have always believed, is a developed feeling. And reading, of course, is, too, one which affirms and confirms one’s direction, where one makes friends.

What are the greatest joys of creation for you?

The feeling that something hitherto invisible or unknown has deigned to come close to me. The kind of joy that comes when a bird alights near you — just like on the cover of my new book, a chickadee once crawled all the way up my pant leg, up my hair and planted itself atop my winter hat — or a plant softly turns its stem toward you. “Poetry keeps human beings open to the invisible, the hidden, the infinite unknown, always on the threshold of what is to come,” writes the poet Adonis. It is the feeling that hidden life has revealed itself to me.

What is awaiting you on the reading desk now?

The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. The University of California Press just published this series of essays about one of my favorite poets, a book many of us have been waiting decades to have in hand. Adonis: Selected Poems, translated by Khaled Mattawa. Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics by Rebecca Solnit, and One with Others, by C.D. Wright.