Essays on the life of the image and its role in visionary experience through a range of cultural practices focus primarily on poetry but include painting, sculpture, and song. Earth Recitals engages with the image in the history of poetry, as well as with contemporary poets, philosophers, archaeologists, 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.Melissa Kwasny has published four collections of poems, two novels, and the anthology Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950. She is also, with M. L. Smoker, editor of I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. She lives near Jefferson City, Montana.