Claire DeVoogd

Over several months this year I corresponded with the poet Claire DeVoogd about her 2023 book Via, which I came across when it was published by Winter Editions, a new press founded by the poet Matvei Yankelevich. Matvei’s work as both a poet and an editor has had a formative influence on my life—I was on the editorial staff of his press Ugly Duckling for several years, and my work as an artist remains closely tied to my involvement with the world of contemporary poetry—so I was naturally very excited when he started a publishing venture on his own where his vision wouldn’t be obstructed and he could stretch his wings.

I’m grateful to Full Stop for publishing this piece, which is a wide-ranging conversation in a mode that I don’t see very often—one that is about poetics in the sense of trying to articulate what the work does, even if it is only perhaps one breath of what it deserves. Our conversation was a small kaleidoscope of reference points from the Black Plague to the American filibuster and many other things, and I had a lot of fun delving into it with DeVoogd. I am allergic to what Pound called the “mendacity of paraphrase,” so I am going to let our conversation introduce the work itself, but maybe I can venture an oblique description of what the experience of reading the book felt like for me.

This morning I woke up early out of excitement to go to the yearly library book sale in my home town. The library had posted the date but not the time of the sale on its website, so I called their landline to inquire, but nobody picked up. As I listened to the line, I realized it was still only a little after 7:00 AM and there was probably nobody around yet. But before hanging up I hesitated for a few seconds, for some reason compelled to continue listening to the ringing on my end of the line. Listening to it, I realized that I was feeling a sweet kind of joy, and maybe this is why I had even made the phone call in the first place, because I was imagining a telephone ringing in an empty library. That antique sound of a bell that signals someone listening had nobody around to hear it but the books.

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Abraham Adams: Greetings, Claire. First, congratulations on the incredible new book, Via. I’d like to dive in with my impression of what the first poem, “Siste Viator,” is doing. The poem feels like a memory of something that is not straightforwardly identifiable, but it reminds me of a particular kind of fear I occasionally feel while falling asleep, when my imagination begins to produce singular images, and some part of me recognizes that I am in the drift of the singular and therefore completely alone, as I imagine the action of the imagination to be in the process of a person dying. It’s possible that this impression was influenced by what Susan Howe has written about your book—that it’s a “eulogy for life on this earth”—or Robert Glück’s description of it as post-apocalyptic. Curious ideas, because what voice is left to narrate such a thing, after the end? What do you think about the idea that this is the place from which Via is speaking?

Claire DeVoogd: Hi Abe! Thank you. That’s a really apt reading. I think that poem was written from an attitude of sleep, in lieu of one of death. Sleeping instead of dying through war. In part as a way of approximating the dissonance of those disasters one might read about in “real time” from thousands of miles away, maybe from the comfortable seat of empire, that feeling of simultaneous total proximity and total dislocation. A sense of time and place simultaneously halcyon and catastrophic. I guess the dissonance is ghosted here by the figure of Chaucer’s Ceyx (who comes up later in the book, too), standing at the foot of his beloved’s bed, she in a “dede slep”, he a corpse animated by Morpheus, dripping with the water he drowned in. (That’s from the beginning of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: The sick and sleepless poet deep in his books late at night reads the story of Ceyx and Alcyone and then passes out, into the poem proper.)

The question of voice—I think this is really important in the book. How can a voice speak after death and what is it speaking for. One thing a poem does is throw a latent voice into a future that then can speak it, and then the poem can go on for however long being spoken until at some point it goes silent. Then maybe it can start to speak again fifty or a few hundred years later. . . . But here and now in my reality at least, “the future” can seem so vexed and precarious that that potential for future speech feels already kind of foreclosed upon. I think some of our poetry responds by eating its own tail instead. Ouroboric verse, drawing tightening, self-reflexive circles. Maybe this book tries to “speak through” such autosarcophagy. Speak with its mouth full. That’s probably why there are a lot of interlocutors in it, and partly why Chaucer matters to Via; he’s a pro at speaking with his mouth full of textual antecedents. And Marie de France who modestly claims she’s just going to write down some lais she’s heard as a way of keeping busy.

Fascinating. It is interesting that you mention this Chaucer text, which begins with the narrator’s anxiety that he might die from lack of sleep; I am currently caring for a newborn, and I am in constant delirium and experiencing bizarre dreams. The second poem in Via, “Errands,” initiates your “correspondence” with Marie de France, pursuing a narration that is, in its own way, dreamlike. It could be said to belong to a certain textual tradition of narrating dreams with fidelity to their meandering, metamorphic course, in which the endless dream story Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) is an early landmark—a work that far exceeds reasonable parameters of giving dreams their due, a real nightmare of a book for those who find dream-retelling to be boring. I’m wondering about Via’s relationship to this kind of medieval and early modern literature. It reminds me of Umberto Eco’s characterization of his time as “neomedieval,” when he asks whether we should think of the twentieth century as a “good” or a “bad” Middle Ages, invoking the aftermath of the first millennium’s “period of crisis, decadence, and violent adjustments.” What kind of Middle Ages do we find in a passage such as this one from “Errands”?

The old fountain cracked in half with its ancient grammar

rubbing away stands in a bus terminal and poor people lie

in its shade, among grackles gleaming and leaping in car

exhaust. Others have lunch. In this way it grows more and

more lifelike.

Might we read “Errands” as a neomedieval poem, in its adaptation of Hypnerotomachia-like chronicle of events to an experience of—I’m speaking reductively—language? Perhaps Via is a neomedieval book in this and another sense: You describe your view of a “vexed and precarious” future that is perhaps “already kind of foreclosed upon,” a feeling you no doubt share with many people in the present as well as in the period we are discussing. To quote the resonant first line of Rosemary Horrox’s 1994 book The Black Death: “The disease which swept across Europe in the late 1340s seemed to contemporaries to herald the end of the world.” The titular duchess in the Chaucer text you’re drawing on was a plague victim. The listeners in the Decameron receive its stories while they hide out from that apocalypse. Is this what we are doing as we listen to Via?

Congratulations on the newborn! Pray to Morpheus.

Yes, I think we are hiding out in that poem in a Boccaccian sense, dilating language to try to make a sanctuary and push away something else.

Those medieval apocalypses—the plague or the collapse of Rome or the great wars and schisms and economic collapses—come to be understood as un + coverings, too, though. Historiographically, they work like that, seeming to reveal a world that grows more and more lifelike, more and more to the quick, or like the life we are in.

I think the relationship between speaking and dreaming or language and dreaming limns this for me. How the retelling of a dream can seem to dissolve the dream, an uncovering that undoes it, as it enters real time and space as words. And suddenly you’re brought back in a profound and sometimes embarrassing way to “reality,” like the act of speaking the dream compounds your life’s own reality, depositing you gracelessly into the real constraints of time and matter and language.

In the spirit of boring dream retelling, a dream that’s important to me and that bears on the passage from “Errands” that you quote above: I’m in the midst of some sort of apocalypse defined by everything cracking. Like the cracks in plaster or old paint, but they’re everywhere, and I’m taking pieces of words and putting them over the cracks to buckle them together into a new version, whether of the words or of the world, it’s not clear. It’s very Sesame Street, like big prefixes and suffixes I can move around. I think that’s a neomedieval dream in a sense Eco describes: “The Middle Ages have never been reconstructed from scratch: We have always mended or patched them up, as something in which we still live. We have cobbled up the bank as well as the cathedral, the state as well as the church . . .” So that the “apocalypses” of a medieval past, the ruptures and revelations, are lived over and lived within, becoming language, landscape, architecture, and infrastructure. (Somewhere Freud imagines the unconscious as a Rome in which “nothing has passed away,” which is an interesting thought experiment—thirty centuries of the creation and destruction and entropy coexisting along with the wholes or originals, at every stage of change. And the dream, and the speaking of the dream, of course, a doorway into this unbelievable Rome.)

Actually I think that the boringness you allude to—or the feeling of desperation—when someone captures you and makes you listen to their retelling of a fragmenting dream that increasingly eludes them in language is operative in Via too. The poem as exhausted artifact, cobbled together and eluding the speaker as they grope in words for a kind of narrative coherence and sense that the dream resists. Rome crumbles.

And then I guess in a pedestrian way it seems to me that the idea of the “middle” pertains when we’re looking “backward” at something from the conceit of some kind of end point. Middles move around unless the “end” has already been fixed. That, too, seems to me to be one aspect of the neomedieval in this book: some kind of millenarianism implied by the vantage of the post/modern/present relative to the Middle Ages as such. So the conceit of using language to hide out, or using speech to dilate time, poem as filibuster—is in conversation with that idea too; language “pulls” the middle towards it by delaying the end.

I am interested in these slightly different ideas of poetry as “sanctuary” and as “filibuster,” or waiting-out and delaying. Maybe Via is both, belonging to a Decameron mode of sanctuary, where the time of language fills the other side of an ongoing event (like a plague outbreak); and a filibuster mode comparable to the conceit of A Thousand and One Nights, where the text’s elaboration serves to postpone an event that then never transpires—Scheherazade’s execution, posed as being in the hands of the listener. In a seemingly more prosaic way, actual congressional filibusters sometimes turn into inadvertent poetry readings when an unrelated text is used as a script for reading aloud to prolong the situation. One hears about senators reading from the phone book, for example—which sounds to me like the potential stage for a very unobstructed encounter with the sound of names and numbers. Words read in such an artless context are permitted to become present with a kind of novel bareness and integrity as things in their own right, strictly because the situation is not at all aimed at making them so.

The models of waiting and delay here and in the Decameron and the Nights dramatize the contradictory necessity of a determining event that they hollow out or nullify, and its transformation into something else. Hence the ambiguous identity of the “war” in Via and its status in time. What any situation is supposedly “about” appears, in this light, as the symbolic object that arrests our attention such that our awareness of another, clandestine reality of experience becomes intensified. As in the intensification of the image of Kafka swimming that we find in his diary in the first week of WWI: “Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.”

I’d like to offer a closer reading of some of the text of Via, so the poem “Like News in Wartime” would seem to suggest itself here, but that piece is more complexly organized than I can make present in its entirety—in fact, many of the poems refer to one another and are titled and indexed in a manner that appears to gesture to the difficulty if not impossibility of things standing on their own. This seems, actually, to make it all the more interesting to quote one whole poem; here is “Ever,” the second-shortest poem in the book:

The flowers growing forever.

The trees rising forever.

The wind pouring forever.

The crane bleeding forever.

The clouds wandering forever.

The fish singing forever.

The flowers looking forever.

What a beautiful poem. It coordinates such a complex space via the minimal variations of a repeated structure. These are not grammatical variations, but, for example, changing degrees of contrast in the familiarity of the pairings between each subject and verb; contrast in the sense of narrative temporal particularity or eventhood in each line (e.g., the crane seems to be bleeding at a particular time, as opposed to the flowers growing and trees rising in a more scenic background time, all of which is contradicted and thus highlighted by their insistent pairing with “forever”); the sort of asymmetry and circularity of the return to flowers in an image containing a high degree of contrast in the familiarity of the association between them as subject and the verb “looking.” Such a mode of minimality and structural variation makes the being of the poem seem to emerge negatively out of the differences within its pattern, and yet it simultaneously reads as emerging from the positive surface where a very simple pastoral story, one too simple to be spoken, becomes visible within its contradictory position as eternal.

But these sorts of observations of the light in the facets aside, I am quoting it on its own in part because the book is causing me to think about the contradictory nature of doing just that—of a poem’s contradictory inextricability from the event that determines it from the outside, and yet that it cannot make present—what Celan called “its own ‘20th of January.’” The wait, the delay, do not exist without this structure, and yet they are precisely what allows it to become hollowed out and filled with a different mode of time. How does it strike you to see “Ever” on its own like this?

I love that idea of the filibuster as inadvertent poetry reading.

I think “Ever” is particularly interesting in relation to the context you bring up here because isolating it from the “filibuster” makes it more evident that it’s a form that could go on “forever”—like “Survival Strategies”—there’s no internal rhetorical or formal or narrative or other pressure or reason to end built into it. It could continue to report what things are doing forever, forever. And then in that light the second “flowers” line is a too-emphatic gesture of preemptive closure against the possibility of forever the form proposes, like: TL;DR, here you go, the oxymoronic end has already come almost before the interminable poem has begun! I think that connects to the Celan-ness—the correspondence between the material poem, with its words and tropes and images, and the poem’s impossible event. I added that line much later, maybe a year after writing the poem. That assertive closure is funny to me in a grim, absurd kind of way.

And then also, the choice to end—of necessity an aesthetic choice because there’s no other motivation for it in the poem. Douglas Crase has an essay called “The Leftover Landscape” about American landscapes and the painters Robert Dash and Eugene Leach—I was just rereading it because I am making a film about the NJ meadowlands and landscape art—he quotes Fairfield Porter: “Aesthetics is what connects one to matters of fact . . . it is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.” Which I think is to the point here, in the choice not to write the poem that goes on forever. Forever—a terrifying idea in many regards. It’s not proper to earthly creatures.

Actually this reading makes me think “Ever” is really a complement to “Survival Strategies” in lots of ways—“Survival Strategies” being that long poem in small couplets that is sort of the via negativa of the book—like “Ever” has an opposing charge but is part of the same forcefield.

Indeed I feel as if this conversation about your beautiful book could go on forever, and I hope that it does for a long time in your readership. Perhaps I can leave it to one of them to explore the relationship between “The flowers growing forever. / The trees rising forever. . .” and the speech in which the immortal at the end of the Epic of Gilgamesh implores the hero to give up his aspiration to live forever, which includes the lines: 

Do we build a house forever? 

Do we make a house forever?

Do brothers divide an inheritance forever?

Do disputes prevail in the land forever?

Do rivers rise in flood for ever?

Is “Ever” a response to this text’s call? Anyway, I mean, I can’t and don’t want to go on forever here either. It is funny you mention the actual duration of writing the poem—readers of our conversation will not be able to tell that it has taken me quite a long time to respond within this conversation at certain points, which again I blame on the baby. This is a peculiarity of writing that bears on its sacred status, the collapse of the temporality of its creation into the “forever” of the text. Apropos of your statement that forever is not proper to earthly creatures, I just encountered a meditation on the difference between immortality and eternity at the end of Byung-Chul Han’s Vita Contemplativa, in which he identifies the eternal with the “festive”—the intensity of what “stands still”—and the more literal sense of indefinitely extended duration, sometimes called sempiternity (a word I find very ugly). These senses are often conflated, as in the conventional interpretation of John 6:47, translated as “He that believeth in me hath everlasting life,” which most Christians understand to mean a promise of sempiternally extended individual personhood, God bless them. (The word in question, αἰώνιον, is often translated as “eternal” instead.)

I think we are instead concerned here with the peculiar contact with a forever within the sense you are describing that something “could” go on forever, the way that foliate interlace in Islamic decorative art makes its own potential infinite repetition felt, and is sometimes understood as standing in for figural representations of divinity for that reason. It strikes me that these forms of time in which we do not go on forever but make contact with a “could” can catch historical events in their net, foreshorten them, in a particular way, and that Via’s, how to put it, contextualism, is celebrating. The could-be-forever behind the not-forever is like the “sea below the sea” in your poem “Dream”: “I see the huge sea below the sea / of which this cathedral / and pool were only anteroom / it is the forever sea.” Unfortunately I’ve lost track of the scholarly study of Homer I once read that describes his vocabulary in terms of a historical “sedimentation”—how evidence of the oral tradition passes through many generations can be found in the way that the poem makes reference to materials that did not coexist historically. I’m thinking of Via as a kind of historical sedimentation—where, for example, Maya Deren coexists with Marie de France—a time out of time where the poem has “throw[n] a latent voice into a future that then can speak it.” 

I am looking forward to your film about New Jersey meadowlands. It has been inspiring for me to encounter this beautiful new book of yours, which I understand as a kind of meditation on the crossing of history’s forever and the eternity of writing, that temporal meadow to which we are permitted to return. What else is next for you?

That’s amazing those lines from Gilgamesh—would you believe I’ve never read it. But I agree with your study of Homer that texts turn into stratigraphy. They’re the terrain one makes a poem on—that sedimentation. (There’s a correspondence perhaps to Byung-Chul Han’s “eternal” you mention above.) So I’ll say I think “Ever” could be a response despite me. I was thinking about Brecht’s epigrams, among them this one (trans. here by Michael Hofmann):

This is all there is, and it’s not enough.
It might do to let you know I’m hanging on.
I’m like that man who carried a brick around with him
To show the world what his house used to look like.

—maybe Brecht read Gilgamesh. And “Ever” is trying to make a kind of restitution. Not to Brecht himself, but of the brick.

The film, which is a collaboration with the filmmaker Nate Lavey, is absorbing lots of attention right now. It involves trap rock, mud, and phragmites, William Carlos Williams, Nancy Holt, and Robert Smithson, the psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, and the New Jersey Turnpike, among other things. I think it’s about negotiation around art making and landscape making—how these things can consolidate into form out of an admixture of contingency, conversation, compulsion, and conflict. And what if anything is revealed by looking hard at a thing for too long. A fantasy that you can peel the layers of history back and get to the core.

Other than that I’m working on two books of poetry—one is about consuming something called reality through screens, the other is a Paradise. They may turn out to be the same thing—that would be elegant.

Abraham Adams is an artist based in Gainesville, Florida. His work has recently been exhibited at Candid Gallery, ASC Gallery, and Galleria Objets in London; and Culterim Gallery in Berlin. His artist’s books include Ambulance Chasers (MIT Press, 2022, with a text by David Joselit) and Nothing in MoMA (Punctum Books, 2018). He holds graduate degrees in art and poetry from the Royal College of Art and Brown University. He teaches at the University of Florida.