Melissa Kwasny, The Nine Senses, Milkweed Editions, 2011.
In this groundbreaking fourth collection comprised of exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers. The questions that have informed much of Kwasny’s previous work—how does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? What can we learn about being human from non-human forms of life?—find a new urgency in The Nine Senses, as image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision, one that is often dire and surreal. “Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to the surreal in the sense that Breton defined it—as resolution of the real and the dream,” Kwasny writes in the title poem. Thematically rich and varied, touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection puts Kwasny on the forefront of American poetry, and asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?
“To read the poems in Melissa Kwasny’s The Nine Senses is to enter a sensibility so finely tuned that each moment of the experience is achingly real. This is a startling and wonderful book.—Christopher Howell
“Kwasny has written us a book of charms, in the old sense. A book to bind us to the world, and to each other.”—Sarah Gridley
Melissa Kwasny, Reading Novalis in Montana. Milkweed Editions, 2011.
This tour de force by the author of Thistle and The Archival Birds marks a breakthrough in Melissa Kwasny’s poetic investigation of a collective consciousness. Kwasny divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism, surrealism, postmodernism, and more—inform daily life. Finding inspiration in the mountain West, Kwasny weaves a shimmering web of connections. Throughout, details of lived experience emerge—hiking through the Pacific Northwest, caring for an elder’s great granddaughter, helping a friend deal with cancer, sorting through the ruins of a relationship—and yet the interior voice is always tuned to the physical world, envisioning the shared understanding that connects all life. Versatile in its forms and expressions, encyclopedic in its comprehension, Reading Novalis in Montana is a virtuoso performance.
Metaphoric, allusive, and richly layered, Reading Novalis in Montana is the breakout book of a poet in her prime."Kwasny’s poems strike that tension between the concrete and the ethereal. Here is a voice brave enough to admit loving 'flowers/more than people' and giving readers every reason to understand and celebrate that conviction. Read this book and know what it means to live with the world, rather than on it."—Eric Gansworth
"Surrounded by new books of poems that seem increasingly thin and merely clever, Melissa Kwasny’s work serves as a brilliant tonic, reminding us of the essential gravitas of poems of distinction. Hers present a richly textured surface and a deeply thought interior..—Albert Goldbarth,
"Kwasny's methods of inclusivity and measurement are as open to empiricism as they are to invocation—of animal spirit, of myth, of the great poet philosophers, of the land itself, where ‘the dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese, first in my lungs.'"—Rusty Morrison
"Truly refreshing . . . Reading Novalis in Montana never stops asking questions or trying to find answers, reminding the reader there is more to life than one settles for or often cares to know."
—Feminist Review
"Erudite, sensitive, distilled, and deft. Reading Novalis in Montana is a positive and delicious read."
—CutBank Reviews
I began with an intuitive response to beauty. We all have an affinity to beauty, I believe, are called to it. And the earth is beautiful. My grandparents were tenant farmers in rural Indiana. I was lucky to grow up with lots of time spent outside, surrounded by forests and farms; at the same time, the farm was on the interface of a town that was rapidly being industrialized. So, at a very young age, I became aware of the conflict between human beings and the non-human world.
I began with my response to beauty, but… my response was more than celebratory, more than descriptive… precise observation took me many more years to learn.
Instinctively, I loved the farm and hated the factory. But beauty, as the Sufi scholar Henry Corbin writes, is a theophany, which I take to mean an experience that leads to other, deeper experiences, a preceptor to greater knowledge and vision. I began with my response to beauty, but even in the beginning of my writing life, in my novels, and later, in The Archival Birds, my response was more than celebratory, more than descriptive, though precise observation took me many more years to learn. At the same time, my poems could not help but be elegiac. I was reading about the rapid diminishment of song bird populations, deforestation in South America, the genocide of many California tribes. My first book of poems, The Archival Birds, bore some witness to this loss.
I later was drawn to the work of others who have written about our relationship —and increasing division from — nature, starting with the transcribed song and ceremonies of the Native people of this continent, continuing on to the Romantics, especially Novalis, and the German mystics, who believed in the correspondence between the natural and spiritual worlds, and in the dream, which still comes down to us, of a past when we were in dialogue with animals and plants. (We encounter the dream everywhere, even in contemporary work. Leslie Marmon Silko in her recent memoir, The Turquoise Shelf, echoes it: “I was fascinated with the notion that long ago humans and animals used to freely converse. As I got older, I realized the clouds and winds and rivers also have their ways of communication. I became interested in what these entities had to say. My imagination became engaged in discovering what can be known without words.”) The work of feminist women writers, such as Susan Griffin and Rebecca Solnit, also informed my work.
Increasingly, I began to feel that, instead of mourning the loss of species and plants, that I might forge, not force, a relationship with them while they were still alive (“an art of cure” rather than “an art of diagnosis,” an idea for which I must credit Ezra Pound), that there might be a means of dialogue. (Thistle is a book wherein every poem is a meditation and attempt at dialogue with a plant or herb that lives near my home. Reading Novalis in Montana has two long sequences wherein I concentrate on what a waterfall and a series of cardinal directions have to teach me.) You see, I believe that, paradoxically, in order to be fully human on this earth, we have much to learn from the vegetable and animal worlds. In order to heal ourselves and the earth, we must include them in our concept of the whole.
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.
| Are you interested in lyrical tension (versus lyrical harmony)? What an intriguing question, a musician’s question. Well, in music there are refrain, variation, counterpoint, and changes in tempo that create tension. How we create it in a poem is usually by manipulating the line length and the line break. In a prose poem, which is what I have been writing, almost exclusively, for a number of years, one loses the line break and has only the syntactical movement within a sentence and the movement from one sentence to another to create rhythm or tension, something I have spent a great deal of time studying in the works of others I love, such as the prose poems of René Char. I would say that, formally and contextually, I am more interested in movement rather than either tension or harmony, the movement between varying degrees of speed — syntax and phrase length — and the movement from one image to another, from the exterior image to the interior one and back again, movement from one speaker to another, one tone to another, one thought to another. For example, listen to this one sentence from a prose poem of Char’s, translated by Mary Ann Caws:
Born from the summons of
becoming and from the anguish of retention, the poem rising from its
well of mud and of stars, will bear witness, almost silently, that it
contained nothing which did not truly exist elsewhere, in this
rebellious and solitary world of contradictions.
In my own poems, I am trying for this kind of harmonic feeling, as in
the striking of a chord, where many tones or speakers or images are
chiming at once to create resonance. I see that same kind of movement
and resonance in the collagist work of C.D. Wright, especially in Deep Step Come Shining and One Big Self. The Nine Senses, your new collection of poems, contains a series of dense and beautiful crafted prose poems. Their combination of image and movement is different from your other poems that may contain more silence and space. How does that feel, this change in energy and drive? It feels exhilarating. I think of The Nine Senses as my ecstatic book. Freed from the line, I became less somber, more playful, able to attempt to speak in the language of flowers, to attempt telepathy, to veer off course, to add four more senses to my way of perceiving the world. In a way, I think the ongoing line without end stops, the completely enjambed poem, which is what a prose poem is, mirrors my attempt to fuse the inner and outer worlds into a, if not cohesive, at least harmonic or resonant whole. Fuse is not quite the right word. I am letting the image lead in these poems, inviting it in and following it as it moves — in my mind as well as in the phenomenal world — to another image or to emotional statement or question to intellectual revelation. In the poems, I don’t have to distinguish between them. No image or statement is there to explain the previous one; rather, they come out of the previous one. I trust their progress. It’s a way, for me, of reading the world at the same time as I am participating in the writing of it. |
| 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. 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. - Greta Aart http://www.cerisepress.com/03/07/walking-in-landscapes-and-seasons-melissa-kwasny-and-the-art-of-nature/view-all |
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