Ways to dream

“What were the dead like? What sort of people are we living with now? Why are we here? What are we going to do? Let’s try putting it in another way.”

— W. H. Auden, The Orators (1932)

Claire DeVoogd is a multifarious poet based in Brooklyn. Via is her first book. Writing more than eight centuries after the legendary Breton poet based at the English court, Marie de France, DeVoogd addresses her literary ancestor casually and intimately, like a familiar spirit. “I wanted to write poems in the form of correspondence,” DeVoogd says in an endnote. “At random … I picked up Marie de France.”^[1] Why make a pen-pal of an old ghost? DeVoogd’s endnote suggests she sought a mode of charting her progress, learning from Marie’s “cartographic dimensions.”^[2] Triangulating by Marie’s (historically and culturally) distant star, DeVoogd discovers launchpads amid everyday (which is to say, constantly changing) weather. 

By such methods, DeVoogd accurately pastes “You Are Here” stickers on all kinds of maps, mulling over Marie, Dante, or Chaucer while “[w]orrying about money, going for walks, having breakfast, reading the news,” and, all the while, “writing under the sign of this century.”^[3] For the most part, DeVoogd, unlike several of her influences and elders (think Frank O’Hara, Eileen Myles, Stacy Szymaszek, or Dana Ward), resists authoring diaristic lyrics that crystalize the mundane as it blossoms into crystalline fractals. Instead, DeVoogd shares detailed description of the kinds of daydreams (and day-mares) many people, and probably most poets, negotiate — in reveries, even as we consume toast and coffee, edit a work email, are brutally dismayed by the day’s Guardian, or vibe (earbuds in) on the bus. 

Everyday moments, when related by DeVoogd, often usher in the uncanny. “Apocalypse (as men in uniform),” for example, describes an instance of casual physical contact that détourns into a darkly vertiginous, violent, erotic identity contest:

My friend is brushing
my leg. He takes my wet face
in both hands he pulls
my hair to see if it’s
real. He puts
his wet face on my face
and screams. I am
him. Enough! I stand in
the medical position.^[4]

In other poems analyzing seemingly recent experience, including “Apocalypse (as we drive north),” DeVoogd, with clichéd self-address, sets us up for a quotidian catalogue, and then instead pivots, to dive into whirlpools of imagery and metaphor, only to climb out, dripping, several lines later:

You spend your days
with an allegory of granite
chipped from a silk skirt
pressed by such and such a
glacier, it organizes
your time, you are blue
you are blue with it, and
roadside with candle shops
gas stations, stationary, antique malls.^[5]

For DeVoogd, humor can punch (not down, but out and up), at humans we grieve, love, decry, hate, and celebrate (sometimes all at once). Her speakers seek to satisfy a deliberate, well-considered, but, at times, unmanageably enormous, hunger for experience — even such experiences as might devastate. (Here DeVoogd shares a tangential kinship with Henry Miller, who portrayed himself as “always merry and bright” while, also, self-destined for “rosy crucifixion.”)^[6] Even the end of the world may be regarded as a mixed bag, not something to be painted entirely in black. Here’s how, in “Apocalypse (as men in uniform),” DeVoogd plots this crux:

The past
is a mythic green 
grotto and the 
fish/rhino/
human blood 
drips sibilantly from
a laurel hung out
to dry on the wire
like a green question
doily and the sun
eats it. Life is like that: funny
in the end.^[7]

Pasts retrieved may appear ever-verdant (“mythic green”), and pondering them may be pleasurable, but, at the same time, dark and claustrophobic, like a “grotto.” In darkness, one who listens and observes must contend with animal noises, and the never-not-moving human blood that “drips sibilantly from / a laurel.” All around one, vital fluids drip audibly, it is suggested, even from the corpuses of half-forgotten poets, whose “laurel[s]” have been “hung out / to dry.” 

Past authors, as long as their texts are successfully transmitted, continue to pose, for us, a vital challenge (“a green question”). The fragility of all texts — ephemeral, in the long span of time, as a “doily,” and anyway destined, in the longer run, to be consumed by fire (“the sun eats it”) — must not necessarily inspire doom and gloom. In the instant of encounter, such fatal recognitions just as well may bring on seemingly involuntary laughter. Beckettian laughter, that is, at the absurdity of our existential situation: “Life is like that: funny in the end.”

The humor unclenched by DeVoogd’s exorcisms is also not unlike that prompted by Magritte’s famous painting, The Treachery of Images (1929), also known as The Wind and the Song, with its representation of a pipe, below which is written, in French, “This is not a pipe.” DeVoogd’s work often leads us to similar epiphanies, spurring productive doubt about everyday illusions, such as when we recognize the early vacuousness of a particular love affair: “You were so indescribable / so worthy of praise / and so on, and so on. / My love.”^[8]

In the “Dream” poems — which alternate, in the section titled “Emergencies,” with “Apocalypse” poems — the reader encounters disquieting, oppressive nightmares littered with atrocious contemporary detritus:

the cave crawls with thousands of tiny
red devils, cartoonish, perhaps familiar
from bumper stickers, valentines, t-shirt
applique, with forked tails, sharp
little teeth, red horns, they 
chatter, chase me, they want to
bite me to death^[9]

Sharp-toothed clichés seem almost to overwhelm the speaker, yet she already begins to demonstrate a distinctive brand of humorous resilience. 

*

How do we successfully message a poet born over 850 years ago? Little is known about Marie de France (fl. 1160-1215), generally considered the first recorded woman poet to have written vernacular Francophone (specifically, Old French) verse.^[10] Scholars question where and when she lived, though many agree she was a French-born resident of England who flourished between, approximately, 1160 and 1215 CE. Yet it is still disputed whether a single author created the texts attributed to Marie. Some academics speculate about whether Marie was, in fact, a man. Her full name, too, is a cipher: “Marie de France” is a handle contrived for convenient reference, partly because the poet addresses herself as “Marie” several times, and partly on account of her assumed birthplace.^[11]

Marie’s Lais render Breton folktales into exquisitely ornate poems, rhyming narratives of high artifice. Despite, or perhaps because of, Marie’s formal elegance, her short, action-packed Lais are compellingly readable, often spellbinding. The Lais borrow exciting plots from their demotic, anonymous sources, and captivatingly refigure and reconceive them for a refined courtly audience, at a time when tales of knights, ladies, and chivalry were modish.

Marie is keen, occasionally, to insert her own graceful but mordant asides, based, no doubt, on close observation of 12^th- and 13^th-century English mores. Consider this moment, from Marie’s lai, Chaitivel:

It would be less dangerous for a man to court every lady in an entire land than for a lady to remove a single besotted lover from her skirts, for he will immediately attempt to strike back. ^[12] 

Marie calls out a sexual double standard, side-eyeing the idiocies of “besotted” male suitors, and pointing out real traumas women faced (and, of course, still face) at the hands of spurned lovers who, too often, “strike back.” Witty and wise, Marie, whoever she was (and remains, for today’s readers) cuts a companionable, intimate figure. What’s more, Marie, a bit like a good modernist (I only halfway jest), self-referentially appraises the literary novelty, the newness, that she takes as her task:

Anyone who intends to present a new story must approach the problem in a new way and speak so persuasively that the tale brings pleasure to people.^[13]

The poet’s challenge, as Marie frames it, is to achieve singular originality — and, equally critical — to entertain her audiences.

When encountering poets far removed from us in time, an array of readerly postures are commonly considered appropriate. Here are just several. One reader may gather, like a magpie, tidbits of historical and biographical data, and glean (squinting if necessary) the poet’s life’s reflection in their work — sometimes recasting authors as unreachably opaque quiddities. Another reader, like an officer of the peace, arrives bearing the badge(s) of theory, to test how well the text/author accords with the priorities of the world-systems such readers protect and serve. The supplicant reader prostrates themselves before authors, mortifying themselves with their inability to decode whatever appears, in the dominant text, impenetrable. Even more readers, however, choose wholly to ignore many ‘classic’ texts, satisfied, perhaps even a bit contemptuously, to allow hoary classics to gather dust in off-site library storage. 

Anyone could come up with many more such generalizations. Of course, simplistic caricatures of readerly postures like those I’ve just drawn are ridiculously incomplete and reductive. My cartoons certainly don’t do justice to cultural workers who employ subtle combinations of critical approaches to treat of their sources judiciously and win brilliant insights. To speak only for myself, though, I know that, at different times, I have tried on critical costumes not unlike those I’ve just sketchily drawn. 

DeVoogd, as already suggested, champions a rather different readerly approach, one that seems to me, right now at any rate, a bit rare and much-needed. Without entirely critiquing, or rejecting, other interpretive stances, she favors an immediate, even downright Romantic, interlocutory engagement with eminences of the past, including Marie, Dante, Chaucer, and many others.

What will happen, she appears to ask, if we approach such figures as still-living peers? What if 800 years is, in fact, not such a very long time ago? What if poets can in fact perceive their ancestors from close-up — not face-to-face, perhaps, but as if walking side-by-side? What actually may be moving in parallel, both in the practices of new poets and those of their still-decomposing forebears? What may appear to us if, medium-like, we encounter these ghosts with present eyes, minds, and hearts curious and brave enough to let them in? Might we accompany them on circuitous pilgrimages, and talk to pass the time? 

“I think of the writing of poetry as a kind of pilgrimage,” DeVoogd told me during a recent, unpublished, interview: “a journey that is mysterious, fraught, sometimes dangerous.”^[14] Building on this, she invoked the author of the Divine Comedy, whom she had channeled in her recent chapbook, Purgatory (2023):

What I really wanted was to have a conversation with Dante. He really invites that, and he doesn’t get taken up on the invitation enough. More readers could say, “I’ll enter into this conversation, and I will walk along with you.” I wanted to cut Dante down to human size a little bit, as well.^[15]

Here DeVoogd suggest an intimate, complicated, and not-uncritical partnership with a literary great, just like the one she pursues in her correspondence with Marie. 

Despite its many apocalyptic, nightmarish terrors, and its alarming findings (“everything has always been there, or is gone / including those things that remain unseen,”), Via is exemplary of refreshingly enthusiastic, even amateur, engagement — of a kind that, dare we say it, is sometimes hopeful, sometimes helpful.^[16] While the book’s initial project may have been a surreal perambulation and echo-casting in Marie’s long shadow, Via conspicuously grew into a thing of baroque fantasia quite unlike the New York School’s trademark diurnal acrobatics.