Poetic Conversations: Inviting the Reader Into the Poem ~ Danielle Vogel’s ‘The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity’

Inviting the Reader Into the Poem: Danielle Vogel’s The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity (Red Hen Press, 2020)

Danielle Vogel’s third book, the 2020 poetry collection The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, is much more than a group of poems elegantly arranged. It’s a conversation between the reader and Vogel’s narrator. While all works of art can be considered conversations between the viewer and the artist, Vogel takes this to the next level in her collection as the reader is drawn further into the narrator’s mind and body with every poem.

The book begins by warmly welcoming the reader into the narrator’s world: “Dear Reader, even in the most lightless of places, we are able to dig up sensation through sound.” Many of the works in The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity are epistolary poems; as the narrator moves through the sections of the book, her repeated invitations to the reader brings us closer into her life, and the story she is telling is revealed piece by piece.

The visuals in Vogel’s poetry are beautiful and feel almost tangible. The narrator offers the reader something near the start of the book: “Here, a clutch of syllables tied with blue string — red clover, lavender, damiana, juniper berries, and deer’s tongue. A black candle. A copper ring of hair. Ink. Let it warp.” Let it warp, she tells her readers about the ink — as we read on, the idea of what the book is warps again and again, as we begin to understand the story she is unveiling for us.

This same physicality — imagining the syllables as something solid, tied with string and bits of nature — continues throughout the first third of Vogel’s book, which is titled [ Displacements ]. The narrator constantly weighs what the body knows and what the mind (and its syllables tied with string) knows. She tells us, “Dear Reader, the body knows what the voice cannot.” Vogel evokes the idea of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, a nonfiction book that examines how stress and trauma can be stored within our bodies, even without our mind’s awareness.

The narrator’s observation about the body knowing what our voice and language cannot hints at the narrator’s own trauma. There are subtle suggestions woven throughout the collection about memories (blocked or otherwise) of childhood abuse, as when the narrator describes herself as, “A self that was once uninhabitable. A childhood coiled up like some shame shed.”

The themes of memory and remembering — whether through the body or the mind — pulses underneath Vogel’s poems. Invoking the title of the collection, the narrator invites readers to think of “Imaging a line, disrupted, restored again. Hoop of a memory, spliced and re-cinched.” Could this be the line of memory that runs through us? Is the disruption the trauma of abuse? Is the hoop of memory something we can use to connect the disparate line ends, thus splicing together the memories and filling in any blanks left by the trauma?

A section of poetry from [ Displacements ]

In the second of three sections of this book, [ Grieving Miniatures ], the idea of trauma pushes through to the surface of Vogel’s poetry. The narrator observes, “And the decay that has occurred below the body-ground — this is what is carried.” The emotional decay — which here is childhood abuse and trauma — exists deep inside the body, radiating out at times to affect every part of the narrator’s life. This internal decay causes a struggle between what the body is trying to tell the mind and what the mind is trying to form into syllables.

The narrator describes how her childhood trauma comes to the surface, and joins with her thinking and writing:

“Up close, the neurological field of the page, shot through, in its breathing. That synapse between there and here is diaphanous. The ink aggregates and gleams. As if its atomic makeup cannot settle, so instead makes room. She puts her left ear to the paper and watches her childhood hand write her name. An irregular net of sound — a nervous system — reorganizes.”

The image of her putting her head down to the very paper she’s writing on, then seeing her youthful hand write her name is a powerful one. Is she communing with her younger self here? Is she recognizing how her nervous system was deeply affected by experiences in her childhood? And does looking back at her childhood help this reorganization of her nervous system?

As the narrator delves deeper into her past in [ Grieving Miniatures ], she once again reminds the reader how close the relationship between a writer and a reader can be. To encourage this closeness, she describes what it’s like “To share the common wall of a book. A room floating in a sentence.” This homey image places the narrator and the reader in the same room, as they have arrived there via the same sentence by sharing the poems in The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity.

The connection between reader and writer is shown in another poem in the second section of the collection as the narrator describes the particular function of syntax in a poem:

“Particles sound, a pulsing space, a layering of each letter radiates. And here, what is. The kinetic transfer between verbs. Between humans. An always-present tense of encounter, unsheltering, all in transit toward the holding space.”

As the narrator begins to process their own past trauma, she acknowledges the changes within her and the reclamation of her own past:

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ“[ to account for ] [ the turning ]

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ[ in ] [ the ] [ lungs ]

The accumulation of lines vibrate in the eye. The tracing of letters holding space for movement. Physical mapping. Fields of energy, being seen, recognized. Transmitted and transformed.”

Here she becomes more in touch with herself; she is coming into her own as she processes her past and continues to map her experiences with her words. After she writes, the past becomes transformed as it is read by her readers.

The last third of Vogel’s collection is titled [ A Residual Volume ]. In this section, which is written as prose poetry, the narrator fills in more specifics of their past; she has grappled with coming to terms with her experiences in the previous two sections of the book. She describes the time it has taken her to process her trauma: “It has taken me twenty-three years. It has taken me thirty. Thirty-one years have taken me. To meet you. In the space of this page. In the place of this.” After all these years, she is able to unearth her memories and write about her experiences; she is ready to have this conversation with her reader.

The narrator also doubles down on the importance of language as a way to connect with one’s self:

“Where language tried to till a void. To erase something by creating a casing of sound. All moments when a word could not cleave her. She thinks reparation. She thinks proliferation. And the bifurcations of a self across lifetimes.”

The bifurcations can be read as how the narrator’s life was split by the abuse in her childhood. It can also be read as how her life split again when she was able to delve into her past and write about it, and connect with readers with her poems. Now, her mind is on reparations and how to heal.

Author photo of Danielle Vogel from her website

The narrator opens up to her reader about the abuse she faced: “That man, stepping off a bus, at daybreak, during a snowstorm, gave me to myself as if for the first time. Today he is six years into a thirty-year sentence. I wanted his hands severed.” This stands out as one of the moments of true rage in the books. While details of the narrator’s encounter with the jailed man aren’t explicit, Vogel uses language carefully here to focus on the narrator’s feelings and not the perpetrator’s violence. These poems are about the narrator’s journey; there’s no need to devote more time to this nameless man.

The narrator acknowledges the grief that comes up when someone acknowledges and begins to heal from their trauma or abuse: “The way grief pools until it can no longer contain its own accumulation. Grief in the place of absence as a result of silence. A secret even language couldn’t see, impresses.” She notes that grief can grow when there is silence. Once the narrator begins to speak and write about these events in her life, she is then able to move forward and create the poems in the last section of this book.

As The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity begins to draw to a close, the narrator once again reminds the reader that we’re all on this journey together. In a sweet prose poem that drives home how important this connection between reader and narrator is, she says:

“Dear Reader, I wonder at how you are doing. What you have been filling yourself with. I’ve been moving through something and I’ve been so lonely. And then this, your reading, and all nights and through it all I think someone is here touching my knee or elbow. The back of my arm, leaning into me. And parts of me dissolve.”

The intimacy that’s been present through this collection envelops the reader at the end. To take it a step further, the narrator imagines an even closer friendship with the reader:

“What might it mean for you to be able to come over to my house for a spontaneous dinner. Talking, sprawling across the couch and floor, pulling books from the shelf, laughing into them. What if when we talked I could touch your forearm for a moment. Brush your hair behind your shoulder. If I could see your whole self. If I could pull you to me before you left to hold you for half a minute. To say to you, call me so I know you got home okay. I no longer want to contain my own erasures.”

In addition to being an accomplished poet, Vogel is also a lyric essayist and installation artist. The bio on her website explains that her installations and site-responsive works “tend to the living archives of memory shared between bodies, languages, and landscapes.” This collection also shows the intense relationship between our bodies and our languages — and in this specific case, delves into how our memories and our pasts can affect both our bodies and the ways we express ourselves.

Ultimately, The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity is a hopeful story told through thoughtful poems as the narrator moves through her life and begins to heal her relationship with language. In [ Displacements ], the first section of the book, the narrator tells us, “I am writing toward a buoyancy I have not yet learned to create.” By the end of the collection, she places a book of her writing into the sea (“I’ll just get it a little wet, let it warp and blur,” she thinks). Her book “appeared as an elongated ghost and remained suspended, slowly rotating, for many minutes. It let me watch, and I felt myself as weightless as it had become.” In the end, the narrator has begun to experience the buoyancy she has been writing toward this whole time.

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(Explore/purchase the book *at Red Hen Press’s site.)