Syntax of Light, Organic Grammars, and Movements of the Unseen

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 four hybrid poetry collections, Edges & Fray and a triptych of poetic texts: Between Grammars, The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, and A Library of Light. Her 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 associate professor and Director of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University where she teaches workshops in innovative poetics, memory and memoir, and composing across the arts. She makes her home in the Connecticut River Valley where she also runs a private practice as an herbalist and flower essence practitioner through with/in herbals.

In August 2025, I met with poet Danielle Vogel over Zoom after exchanging emails back and forth about her most recent book, A Library of Light, a book which deeply moved me. We found immediate resonance with one another, discussing the book’s goal to translate light into syntax, into human language; we also fell into a long exchange about healing modalities to which both of us are devotees (I practice Craniosacral; Vogel works with flower essences). This interview is the result of a great deal of excited conversation culled into an essence as well, which feels appropriate to represent Vogel’s work of healing through poetry and the natural world.

Penelope Rood (PR): Something I always observe in your writing is this deep understanding of interconnection between a body and the atmosphere itself that is more than metaphorical, that is actually quite literal:

“We are accustomed to thinking ourselves individual, but so many of us feel

unstable: of fracture, disembodiment or conjoinment to something

unnameable, something other than ourselves. A kind of microchimerism. A

persistent presence of another or elsewhere. We are taught to mistrust this

intimacy.”

I’d love to hear you speak to this instability, conjoinment, microchimerism; on this “intimacy,” how naming it, and writing through it, affects your life.

Danielle Vogel (DV): For my whole life, I’ve sensed a bodily connection to this “elsewhere,” as I’ve named it in A Library of Light. As a child, this was a “place” I was able to visit when I was feeling particularly unsafe. Sometimes it appeared as a black lake reflecting the surrounding dark starlit skies. I would float in that lake, that nourishing darkness, and be safe, restored. Sometimes this elsewhere was a sea cavern where women worked and prayed tending the sleeping bodies of other women, anointing them with warm oils, burning herbs, and humming. I think now of the sleep temples of Southern Italy, like the Sanctuary of Asclepius.

Sometimes this elsewhere is an atmosphere that my body shares with whatever vibrates between, through, and behind the matter I can most easily see. Whatever it is, I don’t need to invoke it. It is always there. For me it is the most intimate-unknown. My dear friend, teacher, and colleague, the herbalist Liz Migliorelli, defines mystery as “an experienced state of awe.” There is no conclusion. I open devotionally, each day, to that state of awe, that most intimate-unknown, that elsewhere. When I am rushing through my life, checking off my busy to-do list, and I forget to make time to breathe, to write, to be in awe with this place, this is when I get sick. I think most of us do. A huge part of my teaching life is trying to inspire this intimacy within my students. And through my writing I hope to conjure a haven through which we can make contact with that elsewhere.

PR: Speaking of these special places and histories, these touchstones, I sensed this theme developing in your most recent book of poetry, A Library of Light, around invisible vectors, meridians and the courses movements take that we can’t see as they’re happening. I began to feel that your words and sentences themselves were ley lines connecting the monuments of certain moments or relationships. Does that feel true to you?

DV: Interestingly, the energy of ley lines is at the root of one of the new manuscripts I’ve been composing for a few years, tentatively titled, Oracle Net. I’ve gathered “sacred wound” sites from a circle of friends and collaborators and have been writing with the energy between these sites. At the time of writing A Library of Light, I wasn’t thinking about the energy pathways of ley lines between “monuments of certain moments” as you so elegantly articulate above, but this resonates deeply and feels true.

I experience the moments and relationships in A Library of Light as diaphanous, in movement, still somehow becoming, and so, the opposite of a monument. Language, syntax, too feels/felt that way to me. I wrote through intense grief and as if I were reweaving skeins of delicate shimmering cords stretched across time and space. Imagine light refracted on water but strung across infinity. That is what I was handling as I composed that book. Memory, embodiment, relation, cellular fields, language as light; always in motion, even after the event has “passed.” Language as light-field able to interrupt and alter the bioluminescence of the human body. It’s hard to know how much to say here. As readers of the book know, I studied Biophotonics and Epigenetic Theory for the 10+ years of composing. I am also an herbalist and flower essence practitioner. The subtle medicine of flower essences is particularly relevant here with this question.

PR: Do you work with particular plant energies when you write your books? What is the relationship of your plant work to your writing?

DV: I do. I’ve been writing with Bleeding Heart flower essence since 2009. Mugwort and Angelica have held the border and lined a kind of wild road within. I’ve been in daily devotion to Wild Roses for over a decade. Chicory blossoms have also been very important. The new manuscripts I’m working on are each site-responsive texts and I’ve been writing with plant medicines made at these sites: along the tributaries of the Long Island Sound; a constellation of sacred chthonic worship sites in Sicily; charged energy points across Iceland; and then as I mentioned above: these “sacred wound” sites of friends and collaborators. Each medicine, a portal into the deep-time memory of that place, as well as a way to commune with the entangled—and often compromised—ecosystems of the now.

It’s so hard to concisely answer the second part of your question, though I’d like to try. I understand the poem to be a diagram of energetic connections, a mode of energy work capable of rerouting the body’s unseen energy fields. I understand syntax as a direct conduit to the biological field. Innovations in syntax allow for innovations in consciousness, memory, and gene expression all working together to develop a more possible and healthier form. This intention—initiating bodily, epigenetic, and environmental healing through syntax—is what glows at the core of all of my work. The language of these unseen energy fields is, in part, a bioluminescent light (biophotons) originating in the DNA of all living bodies.

When plant medicines are made—especially flower essences—the energetic imprint of that plant, the plant’s unique vibrational resonance, is alchemically stored in the menstruum. Each plant has its own resonant syntax and what I have begun to call a “light signature.” These light signatures, when introduced into the body by way, for example, of a bottled essence, act as a kind of tuning fork within us. Our specific light signature—the energetic patterned-intelligence of our own unique human bodies—vibrates to meet, entrain, and attune to, or learn from, the vibrational syntax of the plant. A meeting of light and embodiment. Over time, this process of entertainment is how healing occurs, allowing us to slowly repattern emotional, cognitive, and spiritual misalignments.

PR: After reading A Library of Light, I felt I’d had an energetic clearing. I have a background in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, and I recently attended a lecture given by an Osteopath, Ian Wright about fulcrums. In Craniosacral, fulcrums refer to points of balance and stillness found in the body. (The osteopath, James Jealous, wrote, “the fulcrum of the whole is the whole.” I know we could talk about just this single line for hours!) Wright stated that fulcrums are not just spatial but also temporal, and that when he’s working, for instance, with an individual dealing with unresolved trauma, the fulcrum will not exist in the present time and space, and that he doesn’t try to bring the client back into the room or body but instead meets them in the cosmos or a fulcrum that exists in the past at the time of the trauma. This reminds me of what I feel when I read your work.

DV: I’m thinking now of these moments of intense stillness in my childhood, when the sun’s light would shift and I’d stay very still, the edges of me alive and sensing. I’d think: this is important; remember this. In these moments, I experienced what I can only now describe as a visitation. I was both loosed from the bounds of the present and acutely present. The experience of being would become expansive but hyper-localized, as if I were within the throat of light itself. A channel was open. I was safe. My body vibrating, my senses flooding with color. And as soon as I thought I might change into a new form, be absorbed, or dispersed forever by this feeling, the moment would pass and I’d become a child again holding the phrase thank you or I’ll miss you or goodbye for now. This is from where I write. In a throat of light, buoyed by a nourishing darkness. Based on what you’ve said above, I know you will believe me when I say I now understand, that during those moments in my childhood, I was being visited by my future self. Conduit. We kept each other alive. I send the healing forward. “The fulcrum of the whole is the whole.”

PR: Your experience feels so familiar to me and reminds me that the concept of transmigration came up both when I read the last section of your book Edges & Fray and all throughout A Library of Light. I feel like your work is interscalar in that way. A passage from page 56 of A Library of Light reads:

“At the level of my cells: an internal geometric structure that binds,

harmonizes, shapes and transforms the whole body, at all scales, from

the subatomic to astronomical. Light’s dilation. Repairing. This intelligent quantum field.”

I was just thinking, listening to you, about this repair that happens on the level of this interscalar movement. What do you think is behind that?

DV: It’s so great that there’s a word for that out there. That’s the place from which I compose, from within those various vibrational timescapes and scales. I think about how we are constantly flickering, all of our cells and neurons. When I write I get inside that field and try to bring it into syntax because I believe that language has a direct and deep and resonant impact on the physiological, cognitive, and emotional bodies. Think of the traumatized body of an animal being attacked or hit by a car and trying to shiver off that trauma. What if we could vibrate the body from within through language?

PR: I feel this intention in the book, and I feel too this capacity the work has to “vibrate the body from within,” even to jump forward and backward through time to enact this healing. You described your child self as experiencing visitations from a future version of self. I wonder, too, how this current self – or the version who was writing A Library of Light – is healed through time and space and vibration. Your mother and her death are so central to the book. I know you began writing it before your mother passed away suddenly, and I wonder how it was to incorporate the loss of your mother into this work. How did you feel about bringing that inside a book that was already taking shape?

DV: My memory is that it was seamless. Early on in the writing, I was traveling to the Arctic in the summer and the winter, and translating what I was learning from light as I overexposed and underexposed my senses to the sun. A part of what I was channeling in those writing sessions was layers, skeins, of what I can only describe as voices of lamentation woven through the many other things I was coming to understand about language through this apprenticeship to light, and my mother was in everything. We hadn’t talked in almost ten years when she died. She was already there in what I was writing, I just wasn’t writing about her directly. I assumed the whole book would be written in the posture of what became the expansive first and last sections of the collection, and then my mother died and all became very localized. I felt held by the earliest pages I’d written and able to do the work of grieving. She was there in all things.

We have this intelligent bioluminescent field that we can’t perceive but I believe we can feel the resonance of it, for sure. I think this is—literally—the language I’ve been speaking to plants and trees since I was little. I’ve always been able to see these geometries of light coming at me from humans and other beings. I think in part it’s because I have really terrible eyesight and nobody believed me when I was a child, so I walked around with everything blurry, glowing and saturated with feeling and life, and I didn’t get glasses until I was eleven, so I lived that way for a long time. All edges indistinct and radiant.

One of the important things I learned while studying Biophotonics and Epigenetic Theory is that after enduring any type of stress, the spectral intensity of our biological light field increases and relaxes quite slowly. In other words, the traumatized body is brighter than a body safely at rest.

I was really captivated by that understanding. I think of my mother, who had mental illness and was an addict, and about the illumination her body must have had to produce, how exhausting it would be to be so illuminated all the time. So this desire I had very early on in writing A Library of Light, to translate the syntax of Earthen and astral light, sank into my body after my mother died. The writing became a way to make contact with—and calm—that ancestral bioluminescent field carried within my own by languaging.

PR: When I was looking back over A Library of Light I was thinking about how symphonic it feels. There are these movements, symphonic-type movements, and there’s so much white space on the page. It does so much, energetically. I wonder what you think about this musical resonance.

DV: I love that you’re calling them movements. I think of them as movements of initiation, or ceremonial fields I invite the reader to move through. So, in A Library of Light, the first and last “movement” or ceremony or initiation, is a chorus. It’s a channeling of the syntax of light, and I learned very early on in communion with light fields that light is pluralized, so, in parts 1 and 2, I sought to conjure that choral field. It is light’s voices and, if light is what I understand it to be, which is almost too difficult to bring into human language, it is that this is a sacred center that is also somehow striated through everything; it’s woven through our DNA, the cosmos, languages of all kind, and it’s deeply polyphonic. So light wanted me to bring its intelligence to the page in that way. When I originally designed the book, there was even more white space around the first and last sections. I wanted it to feel, syntactically-speaking, like the reader was traveling through the throat of something at great speed.

There are also what I sometimes call the afterimages of the first and last movements of the collection. Visually, you have the text on the recto then inverted on the verso in those sections, and one of my hopes with that, to speak to your original question, was that this would create a kind of glitch in the choral field wherein the next choral field could kind of loop in, all singing, all speaking at once.

I do feel that the central movement in the book is a different kind of song, a grief song, localized in the “I,” of my own voice. I don’t know if that came through for you in the middle section, but I wanted us, myself and the reader, to be dispersed and opened up in the first movement, localized but striated within the second movement through the flickering of each of those prose poem sections, and to be striated, but somehow also held expansively, again at the end.

PR: You describe moments in your writing as “diaphanous,” and “still somehow becoming.” It reminded me of the Office for Soft Architecture and this Lisa Robertson line which speaks to the diaphanous, the porous: “What if there is no space, only a permanent slow-motion mystic takeover?”

DV: I hope to remind people of the gorgeous instability we live inside. It’s sacred. I live my life in a state of intense awe and wonder, plaited through an intense (but activating) grief and fury at the ever unfolding and horrifically violent and irreverent state of things.

For my whole life, I’ve been in deep communion with certain trees, plants, waters, places. I “talk” with them. There is no distance or time in this language. When I speak in this language, I feel my most whole, healthy. I feel this way also when I write. This language is, in part, how I translate my plant medicines into English. There are certain places, like the Snæfellsnes peninsula of Iceland, like Mount Etna of Sicily, that for me feel like Earthen fulcrums. They are my teachers, my mothers. I am in communion.

Renee and I live in a beautiful red barn built in 1799 in the Connecticut River Valley on the ancestral lands of the Wangunk people. It’s a beautiful place, one where I’m slowly learning the language of the River and its tributaries which flow at the edge of town. Also, there are so many glacial rocks here! Glittering with garnet, mica, rose and smoky quartz, amethyst, beryl, tourmaline and citrine. Early on in my life as a poet, I knew I wanted to flood English language grammars with what I call the “organic grammars” of certain bodies of water, plants, and places.

What becomes possible when we (re)introduce these logics into the body by way of the poem?