Edges & Fray: On Language, Presence, and Invisible Architectures

When does a poem begin? How much of the writing and revising process happens away from a desk, from a keyboard, from a paper and pen? If I decide that my dreams are not a part of my poetry-writing practice, what does that do to the poems I write? The dreams I dream? If I decide that time spent in nature is a part of my poetry-writing practice, how does that change my poems, the natural world, and the relationship between?

In Edges & Fray: On Language, Presence, and Invisible Architectures, Danielle Vogel reshapes traditional Western notions of poetry-reading and poetry-writing, and the architecture of the poetry collection. Instead of reading poems in a carefully-choreographed succession, Vogel builds her collection as “a series of filaments.” She tells us, “I cast a thought, leave it to begin another fray, and then return,” in the manner of a spider weaving her web, or a bird constructing a nest. In a frontal note to the reader, we are urged to explore the collection in any order that, for us, “holds.” We are invited to wander, to sound out our own, individual paths, as we would move through any wild landscape. The page, like a meadow, a forest, is a collaborative, relational, space. 

Vogel’s somatic, textual, and sculptural work asks me to rethink the boundaries between the individual and the collective, foreground and background, matter and negative space. The white space wound through the poems slows my reading, reframes the connection between text and the field it vibrates inside, and changes how I pay attention when reading, and to what. In the first section of the book, lyrical fragments are woven between didactic poems, ars poetica, shaped poetry, and photographic images of a collection of nests in extreme close-up. These images, depicting nests held by a variety of museums, never depict the structure as a whole. Instead, the extreme close-up works to highlight the found materials woven into these structures, including scraps of newspaper, human hair, twine, scraps of cloth, feathers, grasses, sticks, and mud. Avian home-making is revealed as a kind of writing, how Vogel defines the process: 

the retrieval
of material       - - -       to produce a desired   ,    shape
                                  as open   :    archiving