Image, says Bly. Use the image to recover the forgotten relationship between things, merge worlds, make associative leaps, avoid mere description and fuse imagination and logic to build bridges between the inner and outer, between the domestic and the wild, and then let something begin to approach you over the bridge. Jane Hirshfield, like Robert Bly, also believes in the transformative and connective power of the image. She is, however, less harsh in her regard for American poetry and more varied in her approach to connecting with the sacred. Whereas Bly argues strongly and almost exclusively for the image as connector, Hirshfield isn't so singular in her argument.
Inward poetry deepens all life around it.
A person who enters completely into the experience of a poem is initiated into a deeper intimacy with life. Images and metaphors are like sliding doors, places of openings through which the subjective and objective penetrate each other. So somebody please tell me what Charles Bernstein is doing. I understand some of it, I do. His poetry is not a door or gate or bridge, it's a window.