12 or 20 (second series) questions with Danielle Vogel

Danielle Vogel is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of queer and feminist ecologies, somatics, and ceremony. She is the author of the hybrid poetry collections A Library of Light (Wesleyan University Press 2024), Edges & Fray (Wesleyan University Press 2020), The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity (Red Hen Press 2020), and Between Grammars (Noemi Press 2015). Vogel’s installations and site responsive works have been displayed at RISD Museum, among other art venues, and adaptations of her work have been performed at such places as Carnegie Hall in New York and the Tjarnarbíó Theater in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Vogel is committed to an embodied, ceremonial approach to poetics and relies heavily on field research, cross-disciplinary studies, inter-species collaborations, and archives of all kinds. Her installations and site-responsive works—or “ceremonies for language”—are often extensions of her manuscripts and tend to the living archives of memory shared between bodies, languages, and landscapes.

Born in Queens, New York, and raised on the South Shore of Long Island, Vogel earned a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Denver and an MFA in creative writing and poetics from Naropa University. She is currently associate professor at Wesleyan University where she teaches workshops in experimental poetics, investigative and documentary poetics, ecopoetics, hybrid forms, memory and memoir, the lyric essay, and composing across the arts.

Vogel lives in the Connecticut River Valley with her partner, the writer and artist Renee Gladman, where she also runs a private practice as an herbalist and flower essence practitioner. Learn more at: https://www.danielle-vogel.com/

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

            When Carmen Giménez and Noemi Press picked up Between Grammars for publication back in 2015, after the initial immense joy and gratitude, I was flooded with an intense fear of being seen in a new way. I was estranged from my family and felt that the published book-object would be a raw extension of my own form, a conduit through which they would have access to me in a way that filled me with a kind of terror. This fear became conflated with a fear of the reader, a reader who might possibly not like the book.

When Between Grammars came out, I had to really ground myself in a new kind of poetics, one that included “the audience” in a way I hadn’t had to consider before. I was no longer a poet without a book. And this book, Between Grammars, was a book about a book. About an author being met by a reader through the unique and intimate ecosystem a physical book-object can create. I had to transmute that fear into intention. And this intention is present in each of my subsequent books: how can the book become a haven for my own story and the reader’s? This question is, in varying forms, at the root of all of my collections.

A Library of Light, published nearly ten years later, is very directly about my family and maternal lineage, my motherline, as I say in the book. That fear, which grew from estrangement, that I mention above became a kind of chapel I climbed inside of to write this book.

2 - How did you come to hybrid writing, as opposed to, say, a stricter delineation of literary forms?

            Honestly? Through the liner notes on a Bob Dylan album called, Desire. When I was 19 or 20, I picked up this album from some hole-in-the-wall record shop in Manhattan. On the inside sleeve, the envelope that holds the LP, is a lyric essay, “Songs of Redemption,” about the album written by Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg’s signature says:

Allen Ginsberg

Co-Director

Jack Kerouac

School

of Disembodied

Poetics,

Naropa Institute

York Harbor, Maine

10 November

1975

I was like, hmmm, I know and love Ginsberg’s work and I’m totally disembodied and I’m sort of a poet, what the heck is Naropa Institute? It was the early days of the internet, so I was able to find Naropa’s website, which was, by then, a university in a state (Colorado) I had never in my young life considered moving to or even visiting. I knew I needed to leave home if I was going to survive my life. I requested an application, applied (in fiction), was accepted, settled in Boulder, and within a few weeks had met the phenomenal Anne Waldman and felt safe enough to come out as a lesbian. It was at Naropa that I was introduced to hybrid writing, book arts, and where I met and studied with writers like Akilah Oliver, Cecilia Vicuña, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, among endless other luminaries of hybrid and experimental forms.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I work like a bird building her nest. But instead of that nest being built fairly quickly, as the bird must lay her eggs, my nests often take around a decade to be plaited into their final and sustainable forms.

4 - Where does a poem or hybrid text usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

            Each of my texts begin with a question glowing at its center. If tended, this question acts as guiding and organizing force. I never want to answer this question, only live with it devotionally letting my days and manuscripts be sculpted by the ceremony. Because I think of the book as a ceremonial container, a place within which a kind of transformation can take place, I am always working on “a book” or “a ceremony” from the very beginning.

I tend to write book-length poems or hybrid meditations. Often these are composed of a series of longer pieces. Although right now, I’m working on brief “veils,” “visions” and “drifts” in two of my manuscripts-in-process. I let the project shape itself through the ceremony of ongoing attention.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

            I would say public readings are neither a part of nor counter to my creative process. But because, ideally, the book-as-intimate-object is central to all of my collections, I often wonder what is lost (or activated) when I become, in a way, the book embodied or the object at a remove, not in the hands and minds and breathing bodies of my readers. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

            Oh, yes. As mentioned above, each of my books has a question glowing at its center. Some of my earlier questions were: What is language’s relationship with trauma and embodiment? (for The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity) What is my responsibility as a weaver of books, of habitations, for the bodies of others? (for Edges & Fray) If light had a translatable syntax, what would it be? (for A Library of Light) While those will always resound through my writing, one of the questions I am holding close now is: What happens when we return language to Land, when we invite Earth into our bodies, when we remember that language weaves us (by way of breath, light, and consciousness) with others, with place?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

To remember. To weave. In a time when many are hopelessly and infuriatingly watching the devastating live-streaming of multiple genocides, particularly of the Palestinian people, their homeland and ecosystems, it is more important than ever that we find ways to remember. What needs to be remembered is a very individual question. But that we, as artists, find ways to remember our shared humanity, our connection with lineage, place, language, one another, especially across distances and differences, feels vital.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

            I love the editor/author relationship and have been blessed by working with Suzanna Tamminen of Wesleyan University Press for my last two collections. She understands my work on a cellular level and her editorial advice, instead of being line-based or structural, is often what I think of as essential energy based. It’s as if she’s reading the vibrational field of my collections. She gives me that level of editorial advice, which has been essential to my editorial rituals at both macro and micro levels.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

            Give your body what it needs. Told to me very recently by the brilliant poet and astrologer Sara Renee Marshall. I needed that reminder, especially in this time of political overwhelm where the powers that be are trying to flood and disorient us. As an herbalist and professor/mentor, I’m always helping others find balance and nourishment in how they tend to their creative projects and living. I can forget to turn that care and attention toward myself.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (hybrid writing to installation)? What do you see as the appeal?

            My practice has always taken place both on and off the page. It is what my manuscripts and their questions necessitate of me. Each of my manuscripts have in-the-field companion projects through which I explore the core concerns and mysteries of a manuscript. These are often ephemeral, durational, private, and site-responsive works. Because so much of my work, once published, has to do with my devotion to reintegrating a reader within their inner and outer environments, I see installation or any of the work I do off the page as essential. My hope is always to activate both inner and outer terrains, the visible and invisible, the conscious and subconscious, the known and unknowable and to bring them into symbiosis. Right now, a lot of that work is made manifest through my collaborations with plants and with/in herbals.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

            On a day when I don’t have to be on campus or go somewhere, I like to wake early. I press my herbal infusion that I always set to steep overnight before heading up to bed, pour a glass, and sip it as a kind of morning prayer. Renee makes us a moka pot of coffee. Then I’ll light a candle and get to some kind of creative work for a few hours. Maybe I write. Edit photos. Blend client formulas. Then we often close the morning’s work with a family hike in the woods. And then we come home and cook a beautiful meal.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

            Each of my manuscripts has a journal or a series of journals within which I’ve traced the evolution of its central question or intention. I think of these journals as living altars for the book. I always return to the beginning. Tend the altar. Relight the taper of the earliest question. And see what rises in the glow of that renewed intimacy.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 

            Shallots and garlic sauteing in a rich extra virgin olive oil. Wild roses. Sandalwood. 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? 

            Oh, yes! I can’t help but think here of The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Everything from a cupboard to a nautilus shell to the contracting spiral of DNA to a bird’s nest to a crystalline grain of pollen. In terms of A Library of Light, I held the drawings of Emma Kunz, Swiss healer and researcher, close over the decade of writing. Epigenetic theory and the science of biophotonics were also central avenues of research while I was writing the collection. I’m also an herbalist and flower essence practitioner and what I learn about poetry as a healing modality through my ongoing collaborations with plants are at the root of a lot of what I compose.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

            I mentioned some of them earlier, but the work and lives and devotions of writers like Cecilia Vicuña, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and M. NourbeSe Philip are incredibly important to me. I’m in awe of what their work, which feels inseparable from a kind of sacred practice, makes manifest. And then there are numerous brilliant friends who I write in community with like a. rawlings, fahima ife, Jen Bervin, Carolina Ebeid, Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola (among many others!) and, of course, my love, Renee Gladman.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

            I would like to meet Antarctica.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

            Something in ecological restoration. I’m very moved by the work of United Plant Savers and have often fantasized about joining them.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

            Writing is essential. It’s kept me alive.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

            It was a while ago, but Lauren Groff’s Matrix really still has a hold of me. I also can’t stop thinking about the film Petite Maman.

20 - What are you currently working on?

            I work on many projects at once, but for the last couple of years I’ve been collaborating with the multidisciplinary artist and director Samantha Shay, her Source Material collective, and the Icelandic musician Sóley on a film project, which has my heart and attention this summer. As a part of that collaboration, I’ve been working on a manuscript tentatively titled Oracle Net, as well as a lineage of flower and mineral essences that work with/in the text.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Danielle Vogel, A Library of Light

 

When we are. When we are there, we lay together and cover ourselves with our voices. When we are ten, we are also twenty-one. We speak of breathing, but this is a thing we cannot do. When we are seven, we are also eighteen. When we are eighteen, we begin our bodies. But we are unmappable, unhinged. A resynchronization of codes, the crystalline frequencies of stars, seeds, vowels, lying dormant within you. we are the oldest dialect. A sound the voice cannot make but makes.

The latest from American “cross-genre writer and interdisciplinary artist” Danielle Vogel, currently an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is A Library of Light (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024), a collection that follows Between Grammars (Noemi Press, 2015), Edges & Fray (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) [see my review of such here] and The Way A Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity (Pasadena CA: Red Hen Press, 2020) [see my review of such here]. As the press release offers: “When poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother’s tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief’s syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks.” Composed across three extended sections of prose poem accumulations—“Light,” “of Light” and “Light”—as well as the “Postscript—Syntax: a bioluminescence,” Vogel examines the shifting of self and of selves, light and of light, and the simultaneity of all of the above through the complexities of grief. This is, as she offers, a book of light. “This field is the first inscription.” she writes, early on in the collection. “A crackling pulse that set me going. I think words like amniotic, birth, origin, beginning.”

A Library of Light exists as both examination and archive of memory, loss, dislocation, connection and interconnection; of light, working through a translation of how light acts, and reacts. “Sometimes, when asked what I’m working on,” she writes, as part of the second section, “I tell people I’m writing a translation of light. Light, like the memory of a color, of a sound that we can’t quite sense, but is there, nonetheless. Inherited light. cellular light. Interstellar. Memories that have already happened to someone or somewhere else.” Whereas Ottawa-area poet Robert Hogg worked his lyric as a sequence of extended stretches that utilized a particular lightness of tone and touch in his Of Light (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1978), Vogel utilizes that same element of light but one that acknowledges its lightness, as well as its weight (or mass), the gravity of each section shifting like sand, until certain might sit lighter than air, and others, almost too heavy to bear. As she writes:

Light lets the grid of a thing respire. Each intersection becomes an or in relation. Imagine the skin of you, all its points of convergence, either through sense or sound, being met at once. The grid begins to glow.

We move in every direction even standing still. We are let by light. It culls something against us. The grid is refracting. Light oracles us. Languages us. Reflexes relation. I become beside myself and something else while stationary.

 

,

 

 

As language contracts, I experience my form. Its skin, sensors and bones, its joins and synapses. Language is erotic, sensory. Atmospheric and physical. The living bridge between the two.

 

,

I like how Vogel holds commas to separate her sections, furthering the suggestion of accumulation and ongoingness to the sequence of prose pieces. One step, and then another, progressing throughout the length and breadth of the collection. The pieces, poems, in A Library of Light are deeply thoughtful, lyrically compact and meditative, working her light through the dark, a call-and-response between the two, each one threading the other’s needle. Vogel holds what otherwise can’t easily be held. There is such an ongoingness to grief, the grief described here, described here in terms complicated and even contradictory; the grief over the loss of her mother, a figure that hadn’t an easy presence, and the years of distance they’d had between them. As Vogel writes: “Grief has a long passage. For months I referred to my mother’s death in the present tense. My mother dies. Was what I said and wrote. What was this slippage? When I found out, I paced the floor until my knees left me. And then I crawled toward the bathroom, picked up an old toothbrush and proceeded to clean the room with it. I began under the claw foot tub. Stretched out, on my belly, my cheek pressed to the floor, I reached for the furthest corner.”

 

Danielle Vogel, The Way A Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity

 

Dear Reader, this small sentence is the hallucinatory sill. I once turned out the lights and invited you to make love to me. Please, I said. And turned over onto my belly and waited. I moved slowly, undoing my legs. I imagined the springs and foam would sort themselves into shape, that you would feel the weight of me and appear. I let you hear me breathing. (“[ Displacements ]”)

New England “poet, lyric essayist, and installation artist” Danielle Vogel’s latest is The Way A Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity (Pasadena CA: Red Hen Press, 2020), a collection structured in a triptych of lyric accumulations—“[ Displacements ],” “[ Grieving Miniatures ]” and “[ A Residual Volume ]”—that combine to achieve a book-length lyric meditation exploring language and how and where it meets body, breath and action. “We breach the noun of a thing to verb it.” she writes, as part of the opening section. “It still needs our body.”

The author of Between Grammars (Noemi Press, 2015) and Edges & Fray (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) [see my review of such here], The Way A Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity is second in a proposed trilogy, itself built as a trio of structures: from a sequence of small accumulations, a series of examinations and a lyric essay. “Dear Reader,” she writes, in the opening section, “all pages architecture intimacy.” Vogel is attuned to the condensed and serial moment, and the notion of the miniature, especially one as part of a much larger structure. The language is liquid, dense and buoyant, composed of a lyric as sharp as it is stunning. This is a beautifully-written, intimate and serious work, one barely given proper due through my own small sentences. As she writes as part of the third section:

 

Small dislocations, memories, suck their way to the surface only to be buckled back to the other side of remembering. I am within a wall of dark water. Holding the ledge of a bright cloth, it is pulled from me.

Having been raised by water, the body sees with the voice. It is contained by nothing. Floating, buoyant. Mutable. How sound can temporarily clothe this body. How it raises a series of locations through relation, through echo and recognition. At the beginning, two children walked away from a bay, and while walking, they unnamed places. But it wasn’t two children, it was only one. Who became conjoined. A woman whose voice, in the shape of a body or book, stood beside her.