poet : ceremonialist : professor
DANIELLE VOGEL
p o e t : c e r e m o n i a l i s t
author photo taken by angela rawlings
My practice is a weaving of forms, often glowing in the space between poetry and essay, writing and ritual, text and installation, research and intuition, memory and manifestation, and the seen and unseen worlds. I write in search of a more organic grammar. One that behaves as water might—at once erosional and restorative—; one that behaves as light might if light had a translatable syntax—refractive, lyrical, tumbling—; one that behaves as air—to compose sentence-fragments that levitate and emit an atmosphere all their own. To write a sentence that grieves, not only in its content, but also through its layout on the page and syntactical texturality. To compose an entire book of thought-filaments, that when read by the reader can be taken up like twigs and plant fibers and woven into a nest of any arrangement. To write ceremonies of sound. To reveal ecologies of experience. To find a grammar of sustainability; a grammar that responds, repairs, and proliferates. To write a poem as loamy as the earth. To build sympathetic resonance. To write in favor of the sensory. To heal the past through the future of the poem. To compose a book underground, in the dark, as the dirt around each word sediments and sloughs. As the syllables and consonants vibrate, eclipsing us, presencing us, netting us within the world.