poet : ceremonialist : professor
Vogel is doing
semiotic soulwork...
-Carmen Giménez,
author of Be Recorder
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."
part memoir, incantation, & elegy.
Wesleyan University Press, 2024
Danielle Vogel is an alchemist
of language, time, and the body.
Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book
Danielle Vogel is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and professor based in the Connecticut River Valley where she teaches at Wesleyan University and makes work at the intersections of queer and feminist ecologies, somatics, and ceremony.
Her hybrid poetry collections include A Library of Light (Wesleyan 2024), The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity (Red Hen 2020), Edges & Fray (Wesleyan 2020), and Between Grammars (Noemi 2015).
Her work also appears in anthologies including, The Book: 101 Definitions, edited by Amaranth Borsuk (Anteism 2021), A Forest on Many Stems (Nightboat 2021), edited by Laynie Brown, and Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan 2018), edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed.
a book , of string and filament -- /
a vibrational object upon contact
- from Edges & Fray, 2020
Poetics
&
Current Projects
I write 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, and even the silences between sounds serve as non-linear conduits for transmuting a body and its consciousness?
For well over a decade, I have devoted my practice to infusing English language grammars with what I think 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 my compass.
. . .
My practice takes place both on and off the page and is enriched by trainings in and studies of book arts, ceramics, land and sea restoration, plant medicine and communication, wild animal architectures, regenerative gardening techniques, the science of biophotonics, and epigenetic and somatic therapies.
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. For example: visual and sculptural collaborations with wild clay, plants, birds, waters, bees, and pigments. Curating a living aural archive of memory specimens. Working with local environmental communities on remediation projects. Developing lineages of Flower Essences. Or counseling clients through my with/in herbals practice.
My work in all realms is guided by a commitment to interspecies and ancestral healing, bioregional literacy, honoring the unknown, reintegrating a reader within their inner and outer environments, and allowing this ongoing and developing practice to directly inform and reshape my poetics across projects, devotions, and books.
. . .
My current books-in-process seek to weave experimental prose forms with environmental literacy, lamentation studies, 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 Oracle Net.
I am also composing a book—part memoir, part poetics essays on poetry as a healing modality—for my students titled, Ceremonial Poetics, which will include a collection of letters to my past students as well as writing ceremonies for cultivating a sustaining writing practice.
Edges & Fray:
on language, presence, and (invisible) animal architectures
Interweaving close observation of the material composition of birds' nests with a delicate examination of what it means to be a writer and a reader, Danielle Vogel attunes us to the hardly noticed but fundamental threads by which we entangle ourselves into the world.
image-text. a book-length poem.
Wesleyan University Press, 2020
Because "a body loosens itself across an alphabet," because "an absent word unsettl[es] the collarbone’s concavity," because "the vowels layering, breathe," Danielle Vogel’s ravishing and profound work resides in one as a thrilling visceral experience. Never has a reading encounter felt so fully embodied—the vibration and motions and shapes of language inside, transforming the day, long after the book is closed.
- Carole Maso, author Ghost Dance
on Between Grammars
The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity
Danielle Vogel creates a latticework for repair—the repairing of past trauma, the calling-into-presence of a dissociated self—but does so while keeping the material of this net of thinking in a fragmented, diaphanous state, glowing in the space between the poem and essay.
part poem. part essay. a séance of a book.
Red Hen Press, 2020
Between Grammars
—
Above the drowned page, a moon
unsharpens its edges, mist-like, a fur the muscle of the water wears. And the
writer looks up through the lips.
She is waiting for the reader’s face. At
the flooded bed of the book. The writer
lets the ledge of a sentence wax.