Heart-Work

                                           Work of the eyes is done, now
                                           Go and do heart-work
                                           On all the images imprisoned within you….
                                                                              --Rainer Maria Rilke

       Two central goals of Heart-Work are to give the participants a space in which to share their experiences. The finished work should raise the public’s awareness of blindness. Heart-Work is an integration of the internal imagery of the blind with the visual art of photography; the visual image speaks with immediacy to the viewer, as poetry does to the reader. Heart-Work is thus a translation as well; and here I am drawing upon poet Denise Levertov’s writing on the relationship between poetry, prophecy and survival. Levertov believes the artist is a translator. By translator, she returns to the Latin trasnferre: to carry across, to ferry to the far shore. Levertov wants a poetry that remembers, and here she stresses poetry’s kinship with prophecy, though she is not thinking of prophecy as prediction but prophecy as witness: prophecy as testimony or presence. The Inuit poet Orpingalik said, “We make poems when ordinary speech no longer suffices.”   Here, I would stress that we makeHeart-Work—the dialogue of poetry & photograph when we want to see with more than our eyes: when we see with our hearts.