In this conversation, I speak with Danielle Vogel—poet, interdisciplinary artist, practicing herbalist, ceremonialist, and professor at Wesleyan University. Over the past 20 years, Vogel has written and published four poetry books that engage embodied poetics, feminist ecologies, somatics and ceremony. Our focus here is her most recent work, A Library of Light, published in 2024, which I first read in 2025, during one of the most intense winters in Montreal. It arrived at a time when I was seeking something I couldn’t quite name. 

I was so moved by the way Vogel writes through grief—not around it, not away from it, but through it. For many of us diasporic Palestinians, as we continue to witness the genocide of our people, the grief is more than unbearable—grief is more than what language can bear. I was searching for a way to stay connected to that grief that didn’t close me off—a way that felt like an opening, something grounded, more integrated with what is. Poetry has always been that way in for me—a way to feel what is necessary to keep going, to keep living, to stay focused as this horror continues. A Library of Light reminded me of the necessary ways intimacy with language can disrupt what we are close to normalizing—even as I felt that language was failing me. It helped me reconnect with what I already know to be true: that life is bigger than us—even in the overwhelm of witnessing so much death and suffering. In that tension—between language’s failure and its possibility—something opens. Vogel’s writing on light made space for another kind of presence: a possibility, an imagining rooted both in the here and now and inseparable from how we might arrive at a revolutionary moment in language.

I ask Vogel about her process of writing this book, and how she came to immerse herself in the study of light—specifically biophotons. We explore how she thinks about these luminous fields that exist from within and around us, present in every living being and entity, forming intricate networks of “imprints” as she calls them. Her research led her to explore how these light fields might be connected to epigenetic and ancestral memory—an idea that deepened my curiosity about her work, her vision for poetry’s potential, and her understanding of writing as a form of ceremony.

Nasrin Himada: I can't stop thinking about your book, Danielle, A Library of Light (2024). Honestly, I don't even feel smart enough for it. It felt like reading intense philosophy again—the kind I loved in graduate school, when I was completely immersed in someone’s deep study of something; in your case, it’s light. But this isn’t just philosophy—it’s poetry. Experimental poetry. Which I love. And I know this is what you do: you’re a poet who creates forms that let us into your process and your study of what compels you. I’ve never thought of light and its multiplicities the way you write about it—from it, through it—how you engage its aliveness through grief and lineage. As a reader, I enter a space of thought that is both material and immaterial. This is something Razan AlSalah and I talk about in the context of filmmaking and image-making. 

So going from that conversation to experiencing your book feels like a continuation—image-making is all about light, and now I know poetry is too. I come to light from a cinematic lens, and you bring us to it through language, intuition, and encounters with lineage that we know are there but that remain imperceptible.

I want to start by asking if you could share a bit about your practice. It feels so deeply interconnected—with the many ways you move through curiosity, especially in how you live with and around plants, water, light, and animals. I imagine that also includes your life with Renee, your home, your writing and teaching, and your encounters with the artists you love. I had never seen Emma Kunz’s work before, and even just that was a revelation, her work on the cover of A Library of Light. 

Danielle Vogel: Emma Kunz changed my life. There’s an incredible monograph—3 x Abstraction—that brings together the work of Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin. I met Kunz’s work for the first time through that trinity of women artists. Their spiritual-making practices really resonate with my own. 

In the early aughts, I met the poet Lila Zemborain at a writing festival and while talking about what it feels like to write, I told her that for me, writing feels like being inside an amniotic fluid—translating the light, atmospheres, and aquatic sounds that are resound there. She said, “Have you heard of Emma Kunz or Hilma af Klint? I think you’d love their work.” I hadn’t, and she pointed me to that book. Seeing Kunz’s drawings for the first time, I remember thinking: this is what I’m bringing to the page. I don’t hear language—I’m translating these light frequencies or sounds that feel underwater. That’s often how writing feels to me. Emma Kunz’s drawings look like what I see when I write. They are what I’m bringing to the page in language.

And something else you mentioned earlier—about film and light, and the conversation you had leading up to this one—connects here too. Some of the earliest questions that led me to A Library of Light were rooted in cinema. I was thinking about memory, illumination, and the body as a kind of reel for light’s imprint of sight and experience.

A book that meant a lot to me in that realm—and still does, though I haven’t read it in a while—is Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema. Have you ever read it? It was published by poet Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba press. It’s about Dorsky’s experimental film practice and how he believes part of his role is to interrupt the viewer. To interrupt their experience just enough so they remember the hidden, the sacredness of intermittence, within their aliveness. Dorsky gave language to what I sensed happening in the realm of experimental poetry. I brought that same devotional impulse into my syntax: yes, that’s exactly what I want to do in this experimental field. So very early on, A Library of Light was rooted in thinking about film and light—light as an imprint on the reel of the body, in the DNA of the body—and the hidden realms we can make contact with in the flickering.

That shifted—or maybe became more honed—when my mom died. I’m excited to be answering this question at a unique moment in my practice. I’ve written and published four books over a 20-year period, and I think of each manuscript as a ceremonial chamber wherein a question gets rung like a bell or tuning fork. I’m not trying to answer that question—I want to devote myself to it. Each book becomes a devotional practice, an attunement that occurs through that question. Now, having published those four books, I find myself with three to five new ones that are glowing—and, in a way, feel like a total mess. This question reminds me that I’m mid-ceremony, deep in the transformation. It has me returning to the beginning of the practice so I can go deeper.

If I had to describe the steps of my practice, they’re not unlike leading a ceremony. The early stages of writing—or even my work as an herbalist or teacher—always begin with setting an intention. That intention might be a question, a desire for transformation, or a longing for intimacy or devotion to mystery. The intention becomes the container, the ceremonial chamber, within which I hope some kind of transformation can occur.

I let it take as long as it needs. I devote myself fully to that chamber, to whatever opens between me and the mystery sparked by the intention, translating the experience into what I think of as an early ceremonial draft of transformation for myself. Then, once that phase is complete and the private ceremony is closed, a new one begins—where I start to think about how to invite others in. How do I reconfigure the ceremony (the working first draft) into a transformational field (the published manuscript) for the reader. I'm currently at a place where I'm figuring out what the next question or what the next ceremony is, because I have a big nest of things that are calling for my attention. And that's literally what I will start to think about when you and I close this conversation. 

That’s such a beautiful way to set us up, because when I was reading the book, I could feel how much quiet is in it—and I could feel its durational affect. I heard it took you over a decade to write, and I wasn’t surprised at all. Of course it did. It feels like every sentence is a container, like you were saying. Each line carries that kind of immersive, integrated attention to the study of light. It could only have taken that much time—it needed that kind of depth and devotion to emerge the way it did. I could feel it. It was tactile. It felt experimental. And in my own work, I often compare experimental poetry and experimental film, because I think they’re both about inventing forms that allow us to enter something entirely different. And that disrupts our understanding of this world. So when I was thinking about your book, I suddenly understood that what we think of as dark is light.

It felt like you were connecting to the imperceptible that is material, that you gave it language. I felt the relation between life, light, and language come alive through the poem. You created a way for the reader to enter the book, a way to experience that relationship across elements we don’t usually access. I am starting in a nonlinear way—beginning with where you are now in your thinking and practice, and returning to this beautiful book you published in 2024. I want to talk about the book in the context of how you are feeling today—how returning to it now reveals something new that didn’t surface a year ago.

I returned to the book this morning in preparation for our conversation and so much came up. It's hard to bring it into language. How do I speak sentences? Let me think. Where do I go first? Okay, so one of the things that really moves me when I return to the ceremony that is A Library of Light—the published book—is how it sets up a chamber within which I can move multidirectionally. On one hand, I feel that without it, I wouldn’t be able to do the work I’m doing now—and have been doing for over a decade—with plants: the translation, the intimacy, the devotion. When I return to this place, I realize that everything I need is already here, as if I can step into the hollowed space of the book itself—as if it were a cave, the mouth of a cave. That was something that really moved me this morning when I revisited it. And when I give readings from it now—this answers another part of your question—I’m kind of amazed by the transformations that still happen each time I read it.

I actually see the English language as patterns of electrical, synaptic lightfields. So I feel that the book is still doing this really interesting work underneath the surface of my body, even though I'm no longer writing it, and that feels deeply moving to me. When I was writing it, I felt in contact with my very young self. Now, it feels like it’s reaching toward my twenty-something self—someone I haven’t thought about in a long time. That’s been surprising. It’s also opening up fields between me and others outside of language. I get so many moving messages, both directly by email, and through my with/in herbals practice, from people who say the book is helping them move through something in their own lineages. They often can’t explain what’s happening, it’s inarticulable—but something is happening, deep below the surface. That’s one of the reasons I love experimental poetry: its deep resonant effects, and how we enter into, in my case, the English language in a nonlinear way, and how this can cause us to make contact with wider nets of healing, understanding, or experience—all while leaving room for the things we’ll never fully understand, which is so important to me.

I love the way you say that because even though I feel there are so many entrances into each section—or even each sentence, and even the different small paragraphs—there are times where I’m underlining almost every line in a vignette. And then other times, it’s really one line that sticks out. But I think there’s so much that a reader can feel—as much as there are openings in language, there’s also opacity around its expression. It can’t fully be... I think that the feeling of what light is doing cannot fully be apprehended. And so I think we get that tension—that there is something we can connect to on the level of grief and ancestral lineage, which spoke to me a lot. And then, at the same time, there’s a philosophy of light that feels like it’s of us and outside of us. You bring that clarity to us—that it’s of us and of the world—and yet it’s still the work of language to almost make it appear if we need it. 

What I was so curious about too is that I had never read something that had this total love and dedication to the book, not as an object, but as a ceremony, as you say. And how you engage poetry, that a poem can heal. And it’s through this practice of writing—thinking about how to use language in a way that also changes it and us.

One of the devotions of my practice is, through experimental poetry, writing against linear grammars and syntaxes—to bring the English language back to its originary source, the organic matter of it. And so, I think of it as a kind of return to, yeah, its organic origins. English’s first impulses—I hope anyway—couldn’t have been concerned with colonization. What would it be to return English to earth, as closely as we can? To get back to the sediment and wind of English, the loam of it, the water of it, the illumination and intimacy of it.

A Library of Light began with a question, which was, if light had a translatable syntax, what would it be? I wondered if I could remember, through contortions of English grammars, the organic syntax of light. And at first those lightfields weren't in the body. I wasn't thinking of the human body at the time. I was thinking of astral fields of light or solar fields of light or the bioluminescence of the ocean. I was thinking of organic sources of light outside of the human form. The book was meant to flood the body of the reader with these organic lightfields or syntaxes. And then, for readers of A Library of Light, they’ll know that my mother passed away maybe three or so years into the writing of that translation and devotion to that first question. And then I started to wonder: if the interior of the human body—knowing that we are full of electrical conduits, that our nervous system is an electrical system, that our synapses are where electricity jumps the gaps between them, and this is all how we make memory, move our bodies, and stay intimate and sensory with the world—if that light field had its own kind of syntax or language. And very quickly in my research, I came upon epigenetic theory and biophotonics theory, and I was just blown away by the science of both.

But to speak of the biophoton—I learned that the DNA of the human body, or any living organic body, vibrates several billion times per second. And every single second, when it vibrates, it hatches a light particle called a biophoton. So, we are hatching little biophotons 24 hours a day, all the time, as long as we're living. And those biophoton fields—these illuminated nets across our whole body—are, in part, where and how we store memory, including epigenetic memory, and where and how we make and transform memory and experience.

I started to think about language’s effect—through syntax—on the synaptic field. Experimental poetry has always been where I’ve felt most at home, where my queer, strange body feels most alive and sacred. I wondered about the effect of pulling certain kinds of sentences—experimental, poetic fields—through the body. What might that do to the biophoton field? Could it repattern that light and make contact with epigenetic or ancestral memory? In my case, with my mother—who died a tragic death—we were estranged for many years, and we never had the chance to repair that before she passed. I wanted, through this book, to try to make contact with her, with my grief, and with the grief further back in my matrilineal line. 

You also asked earlier about the ceremonial chamber of the book—the physical object—and I was so moved that you felt that. The book for me is definitely a sacred vibrational object.

I guess it’s this faith in the poem—as a healing force, as a container for healing practices, or that healing can happen through writing itself. I was stunned by that idea, especially now, in a time of intense horror, when so much poetry is being written. I think about how many poems have emerged from Gaza, how many anthologies have been translated and distributed—how poetry continues to rise out of Palestine since the genocide began. So, I want to ask: before you arrived at this understanding of the poem and its connective resonance to healing, how did you get there? How did you start writing poetry?

My earliest memories are of writing even before I could actually write. I remember reading even before I could read—reading a newspaper, tracing my finger across the inky text. I just loved getting the ink on my fingers. And I remember pretending to write; it always felt like the act of writing was the act of making contact with something so much larger than myself.

I started off wanting to be a fiction writer because I think, for me as a child, it was the novels that I was reading that saved me over and over again—that gave me conduits out of the house that I was in or the relationships that I was in. I wrote poetry, but it was always really private. It wasn't something that I showed people. 

I've been a practicing witch and ceremonialist—without using those words—since I was very, very little, holding small rituals and ceremonies around certain times of the year and the day. And my poetry felt aligned with that, and it felt very private. 

Then, being in school, all of my professors in undergrad were like, “You're not a fiction writer. You are literally a poet.” And I was like, “I'm not a poet. I don't know what you're talking about.”

And then I wound up going to Naropa University, which is in Boulder, Colorado. It's a Buddhist university, started by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg and the Buddhist scholar Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1974. They have a writing program called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I was accepted there for my master’s as a fiction writer. I went and I started to write fiction, but I met all of these poets, and it was my—I don't know—inauguration into the experimental field, experimental poetry. I met Anne Waldman, and my teacher Bhanu Kapil, who writes mostly in sentences but is obviously steeped in experimental syntax traditions. I met Cecilia Vicuña and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.

Through my encounters with these women, I realized that the sacred work I was doing in secret—this work as a witch, ceremonialist, poet—was actually my work, and that I could do it in community. 

Poets like Cecilia Vicuña and Anne Waldman, Bhanu Kapil, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge—really helped me understand that I could bring the sacred work I was doing off the page to the page. And that really is what activated me as a writer. I'm so grateful for the space of Naropa and all of its offshoots—as Anne would say, its rhizomic, autonomous zones.

And I forgot to mention Akilah Oliver. Akilah Oliver was also one of my main professors. She was an activist and performer and an incredible poet who passed away, sadly, years ago. But she really changed my life when she asked: What is the primary duty of repair? —during one of her readings. And I was just like, what the fuck is the primary duty of repair? Holy shit. I'm going to be thinking about that for the rest of my life. And so just imagining very young me in company with these goddesses, pretty much walking around Boulder, Colorado—that's how I'm here.

This leads me to my next question, though I always feel a bit hesitant asking—it feels so private. But I'm curious if you'd be open to talking more about how your divination practice, and the ritualistic ways you live and who you live with—not just with humans—inform the space you write from. How did you bring your divination practice to the page?

I think each of my books would have a different answer for this, and a reader might not notice that this is happening behind the scenes of the book because all of my books are fueled by very private ceremonies with specific sites, elements, and beings. I think of divination as a means of being in contact and in conversation with mystery, with the most intimate-unknown current that runs through all things. And for me, my primary divinatory tool is language. The English language and the language of elements, especially water and light. Each of my books, again, you might not know this just by reading them, but each of them has an element or a couple of elements that glow behind it that helped me translate what I was interested in ceremonially translating through the book. In a Library of Light, for example, I am in deep divinatory communion with light as a language, as an organic language, as perhaps the original language of every single living being. For me, divination is a practice of translation, bringing that intimate-unknown into the known field while still honouring everything that can't quite be accessed or caught in the net of the English language. 

I think that's such a beautiful way you put it. I keep reminding myself, as we talk, that you have this connection to what you're calling organic language—the language of water, the language of light…that we are able to listen to water, listen to light, and that we’re able to experience language through this encounter. 

I do think human languages—all of them—are somehow composed of those languages. Part of my practice is—and I keep saying this phrase, but it really does feel like—making contact with, or reminding myself of, the organic expansive field within. What happens if we welcome those fields back into the body? What can certain bodies of water, or certain flowers, or certain atmospheres remind our physical forms? Or how can they re-pattern our physical forms?

Would you be open to taking us through the structure of the book?

The ceremony of a Library of Light, the book itself is broken into three sections, and the opening section is called “Light.” It's eleven pages of what I think of as the initiation for the reader. The reader has to pass through this first veil of light. It’s written, “We come to life now. When we. When we are. We pick up language like a lit garment, wet and shaken out.”

For me, it’s an incantatory polyvocal chamber and my hope is that the reader will pass through these experimental sentences or the prose poem, whatever you want to call it, and feel a syntax that is akin to what light looks like on water, the way it striates and is a kind of web that keeps reforming. I wanted that kind of spangled syntax to enter the reader's field. I wanted these first eleven pages—as this spangled syntactical reverb veil—to get the reader ready for the central part. Visually, this first part, after each prose poem that is written, when you turn the page, the reader will see the inverse of that text as if you could see through the membrane of the page.

My hope for these inverted pages is multiple: I wanted to remind the reader of the tactility of the page. When I turn the page, it could be a skin; or it could be the view from underneath the lip of water looking at something floating above; or, maybe the reader would think, I haven't seen text reversed since I was a little kid, when I would hold a book up to a mirror and see language made backwards. My hope for those pages is also to create an extended spangled field that could serve as a kind of scrying space. If you are disoriented from the syntax of these initiatory prose poems, that you could either rest there in the inverted text, or use it as a kind of scrying screen to let whatever rises in you—if you're willing to slow down long enough—rise in that space as you're trying to discern inverted language.

After this initiatory space, we come to the largest central section of the book, which is called “of Light.” In the central part of the book, the voice that is speaking shifts from polyvocality to the singular “I.” All that illuminated intelligence of part one gets centered inside of me, the speaking “I,” who starts to think about origin, birth, language, biophotonics, mother, grief, repair, addiction, immigration—all of these things that are living in her maternal line. The rest of the book unfolds through what I think of as little crystalline prose poems, throughout this whole central section, where all of these things are reverbing next to each other. What is origin? What is language? Can languaging help us make contact through time with one's ancestors? How does one grieve? What is a grieving logic? How can I make contact with my mother—through her journals, through my own DNA, through my own matter? All without any resolution, just reverberation.

Then we close with a ceremonial moving out of the book and my body, we return to that polyvocality once more. The last section of the book is again titled “Light”, and we move back into light-syntax: “When we are not yet born, we are also ten. We feel our birth a thousand miles away. We see a body suspended across the sky. We come cleaved at birth. We are both zero and eleven.” And again, we have the inverted pages so that the reader is moving out of the ceremony with intention. 

Then there’s an afterword that I’ve written titled “Syntax: a bioluminescence,” a postscript that talks a little bit about my research into biophotonics, epigenetic theory, and my work as a poet devoted to language as a kind of energy work through the physiological field.

That's beautiful. Such a great way to enthrall us all with what to expect when we reach for this beautiful book that is a ceremony on light. Wow. Thank you so much for giving time to speaking with me. And yeah, thank you for just being open to talking to me about your process and way of writing. 

Thank you so much. This is such a gift, truly just to be able to refocus and connect with you. I lament that we don't live closer. It was so lovely to meet you and get to hang out and eat good food and have a cocktail. And I know that was a huge highlight of the year for both me and Renee.

I'm so grateful and feel so lucky to have met you, and then to have read A Library of Light. Meeting you and Renee was a highlight of forever. And I can't wait until we all meet again somewhere.

Me too. Me too. Truly.