The Art of Reconnection: Daniela Naomi Molnar and Danielle Vogel

In the final episode of “The Art of Reconnection” series, co-host Daniela Naomi Molnar speaks with poet and ceremonialist Danielle Vogel about the scope, power, and possibility of language.

Danielle is an experimental poet who is committed to an embodied, ceremonial approach to poetics and relies heavily on field research, cross-disciplinary studies, inter-species collaborations, and archives of all kinds. Her installations and site-responsive works are often extensions of her manuscripts and tend to the living archives of memory shared between bodies, languages, and landscapes. She is an associate professor at Wesleyan University and the author of several poetry collections, including A Library of Light, Edges & Fray, and Between Grammars.

Daniela and Danielle’s conversation is an ode to the power of language — how the written and spoken word rings throughout the body, how it connects with extremely subtle forms of language both inside and outside our bodies, and how writing, editing, and reading become a ceremony. 

Their conversation ranges from darkness to lightness, from cellular activity to glacial activity, from the personal to the collective. They celebrate the way language acts as a mediating agent between our material and immaterial worlds, allowing us to connect to and therefore mend our interior lives and our environments. 

Daniela and Danielle invite us to wonder: How can language help us touch time? How do syllables and syntax carry memory in the same way a human body or a geologic body might? And how can becoming aware of the embodied nature of language help us connect across time, across lives, and across bodies?

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.