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Melissa Kwasny Explores Image and Vision in the Non-Human World

Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, by Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny talks about her book Earth Recitals: Essays of Image & Vision, and about how reflecting on the images we see in the outer, nonhuman, world can stimulate human creative imagination and enhance our everyday lives.

About the book:

Essays about the life of the image and its role in visionary experience through a range of cultural practices. Kwasny focuses primarily on poetry, but includes painting, sculpture, and song. Earth Recitals engages with the image in the history of poetry, as well as with contemporary poets, philosophers, archeologists, artists, and cultural critics. It outlines the major tenets of Imagism and sketches the transformations the image underwent in modernism and surrealism. The book's central preoccupation is with questions of interiority and exteriority - the image's appearance as being and its subsequent reappearance in the mind - and introduces the writings of the renowned Sufi scholar Henry Corbin.

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Melissa Kwasny
Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is author of four collections of poems, including The Nine Senses and Thistle, winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry. She is also editor of the celebrated anthology, Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950, and co-editor (with M.L. Smoker) of I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Her poems and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, Field, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, and many other journals. She lives in the mountains near Helena, Montana.

Chérie Newman is a former arts and humanities producer and on-air host for Montana Public Radio, and a freelance writer. She founded and previously hosted a weekly literary program, The Write Question, which continues to air on several public radio stations; it is also available online at PRX.org and MTPR.org.
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