Poetics

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Current Projects​

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Danielle Vogel writes toward a more organic grammar. Always asking how can a book, as an extended ceremonial field of a body, serve as a site of radical transformation? How can the poem, the fragment, the lyric essay, and even the silences between sounds serve as non-linear conduits for transmuting the body and its consciousness? 

 

For well over a decade, she has devoted her practice to infusing English language grammars with what she thinks of as the “organic grammars” of elements, plant and mineral beings, ecosystems, and bioregions. What can human languages learn from—or remember through—the organic, polyphonous intelligence and the innately reparative or regenerative logics of specific water bodies, clay and ochre deposits, plant beings, environmental entanglements, fields of light, or currents of air? What becomes possible when we (re)introduce these logics into the body by way of the poem? These questions have been her compass. 

 

Her embodied, ceremonial research practice is enriched by trainings and studies of book arts, land and sea restoration, plant medicine and communication, animal architectures, the science of biophotonics, epigenetic theory, and somatic therapies, and also encompasses aspects of her art-making, such as collaborating with wild clay, plants, waters, and pigments. All guided by a commitment to interspecies and ancestral healing, bioregional literacy, reintegrating a reader within their inner and outer environments, and allowing this ongoing and developing practice to directly inform and reshape her poetics across projects, devotions, and books.

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Vogel is at work on the final edits of her forthcoming lyric memoir, A Library of Light, which attempts to translate—and reorganize toward healing—epigenetic memory or the hidden and intelligent field of light that lives at the microscopic levels of her nervous system and DNA. She brings this investigation to the page through a blending of incantation, lyric, documentary, and elegiac forms.     

 

Her current books-in-process seek to weave experimental prose forms with environmental literacy, reparative plans for poem-gardens, site-responsive poems and ceremonial scores, and oracular communications with place. They are tentatively titled Sea Margin, The Frequency of Flowers, and Water Oracle. 

 

She is also composing a book—part memoir, part poetics essays on writing as a modality for healing—for her students titled, Ceremonial Poetics, which will include a collection of letters to her past students as well as writing ceremonies for cultivating a sustaining writing practice.

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