For Jack Spicer, something remains when everything has been destroyed, and all attempts to find the Holy Grail have failed: God-language. The darkness from which is born the light. An anti-Grail, perhaps. There is no relief, no stability, no great achievement at the end of the road to imbue your life with meaning. You felt you were so close, the Grail seemed yours, as close as lip to cup. There has been no revelation, nothing has changed, the poet is left with the same unanswered questions–or are they the wrong answers to the wrong questions? The poet has even forgotten why the Grail was important. Avalon contains supermarkets now, the mystery has been drained of all its power, what is important now is the money, the exchange, amassing capital. Was the Grail just a hoax set into motion centuries ago for some purpose we can no longer discern? Probably to control us, or better yet, to confuse us. It is like a “noise in the head of the prince.” But there is “Something in God-language. In spite of all this horseshit, this uncomfortable music.” Nothing more can be said about it. The poet has reached the edge of the shore. The wide ocean is before him and the growing darkness.
At this point in the growing darkness of this world, Claire DeVoogd’s Via begins, as she navigates the various possible alternatives to a world coming to end: “For all description, let Revolution after revolution Come quickly and more And more. But let it be Revelation.” DeVoogd’s poems are suggestive in pointing to the mysteries that lie beyond the words/worlds using words; what can only be realized if we strip away the weight of the material, the illusion of it, and approach the center, the origin, the metaphysical nothing which is. But it cannot be described: “You were so indescribable, so worthy of praise / and so on, and so on. My love.” DeVoogd’s poems represent a picture of what is from the viewpoint of what is not. As she writes in “Apocalypse (as we drive north)”: “Nothing is not made incompletely / of what isn’t it.” For her the words/worlds are always on edge of being realized: “These strata were suspended in a chaotic abyss /till Chaos became/the name of that road the sheep followed/out of Tartarus, jangling.”
I’ve come to think of Via as a book-length serial poem; doors opening in the poet’s mind where some light is visible only to have the door shut again. As she writes in “Apocalypse (as a housecat) : “Now the shape / is almost too dark.” DeVoogd gives us silence where there was formerly just noise. DeVoogd’s thinking is heterodox; her subjects shift according to the demands of the poem, from one subject to another, not mediated by the limit of one idea, but changeable, and not bound by the demands of content or form. In the section “Survival Strategies,” Claire DeVoogd is like a postmodern Meister Eckhart proving what is by examining what is not:
Nothing is.
The world is.
The world is full of this sort of thing.
These expressions of the unknowable are part of the mystery of the world. She writes “Nothing is immaterial, nothing, My love, the matter; we must Only open it, turn it over …. Can any understand this noise.” The noise in the head of the prince/princess. The noise or stutter appears in the language as desire. But desire is always immanent. We remember the story of Eros and Psyche. In the Greek, Psyche literally means, “Soul, or breath, life or the animating force.” The child of Eros and Psyche was Hedone, physical pleasure, or bliss. In the poems we are given a language stripped of its familiar clothing, naked as a child, its words unabashed as first utterances.
But what appears clearly said is in fact overwhelmed by ambiguity. The words hold back more than they bring to light, in an attempt to illuminate something that remains hidden, if only briefly, and for the duration of the poem. Then nothing, and all the words return to the void from which they came. Then there is only silence, the silence will remain after everything is gone. You can’t go on, but you go on. That is the closest thing to freedom. Nothing is still, all is moving. These are the old gods speaking: “Well yes the will it drives you even still you know not where.”
At least since Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum, in which the thinking mind became isolated from the object before it, there was a tendency for man to dominate the world, to make nature more perfect than it is. For Marie de France: “Whoever believes in a man is very foolish.” The digital world has all but erased nature. But what is will not be altered nor reveal all its secrets.
DeVoogd writes, concerning the Lais of Marie de France: “There are also cartographic dimensions to the Lais. The people in them are carried or driven here and there by forces which are beyond explanation. As this movement happens, extension happens. Worlds—complicated, angled, multiple—extend themselves around the poems according to those demands the poems unreasonably make. I am interested in this because I am interested in how worlds extend around words, in how a word might work as a de-vice to represent worldly extension.” Jack Spicer writes, in Morphemics, that if ‘moon’ “were spelled ‘mune’ it would not cause madness.” Gustaf Sobin, a very different poet writes “how the / least / shift in syntax, tense / perception, would / re-/ set the / heavens.” DeVoogd has this magical relationship with language; a belief that words can create worlds.
DeVoogd writes about Marie de France, that “I believe Marie isn’t /she’s a motif / which means she can people holes / over in paper or concrete and this makes them real places or kind of like /anchors / around which this lesser / infinity of others and others of worlds and worlds may //pour.” Furthermore, like Alice the poet travels through holes in the world: “The world is holes, the convexed, multiple.” A “hole” is something complete, defined, circumscribed; the word also suggests a kind of void or tear in the fabric of reality. Things are constantly in motion, without fixed boundaries; everything is possible in multiplicity but marred by being fully actualized. And on the other side is an unreal place. In “There” DeVoogd writes:
For this isn’t a real place, like
an estate. It’s an
other, an old one.
But there is no anchor in the world, nothing to hold on for security, each choice is impossible because subject to illusion; there is no way to protect yourself against loss and suffering. The world is constantly ending, nothing is stable: “A city is never the same, but a vertical fracture super-minutely refracting among a moment that continues to recede and remains, indifferent and never the same.” But in the section “Boustrophedon,” DeVoogd writes:
I believe now that the only way
Possible is INVERSION. Those who cannot read
For the white of the page is all that may be seen
Let them come forward.
I believe now in POSTPONEMENT
constitutive, book upon book
I believe now let none speak the whole thing
Is gone a certain terrible wreckage.
Inversion is necessary rather than any regularity of patterns or form or even legibility. As hard as we look, we can’t clearly see the entire picture. Some things can exist and be seen; others cannot and any attempt to represent them will lead to failure. Call what cannot be seen heaven, the invisible or the infinite or finally, God, but language falls short of any satisfactory word. Naming is gaming. We literally can’t know. It is like an eternal blind spot on the mind; the one piece, without which the puzzle cannot be explained, cannot be found, because it does not exist or, rather, this lack of existence is its very nature; it exists by not existing: “let none speak the whole thing / Is gone a certain terrible wreckage.” To speak is to betray it; every utterance is a violation of it. The white of the page is the only expression for it. It is always imminent. The world/word is in a state of becoming. One approaches the world. It speaks to her in its silence, everywhere. Welcoming her into the darkness, the silence that is the world of potentialities and meanings beyond the actual and the expressed.
As if finally emerging from the “hole” the poet returns to the everyday world where she goes “to brunch in Montclair New Jersey,” and “drink martinis” while watching “the Oscars.” She engages in “Small talk about teaching, travel,” pretending “There is an objective.” As if teaching and travel really meant something. But the larger issue at stake is the problem of knowledge; the paucity of what we actually know is true, or accurate; how knowledge is altered when it passes through the centuries. What we know is unstable, the language is unstable; it controls us; we do not control it. Failure is our human lot and don’t tell me the rich have it any better. Being born is the problem. To play the game of being human. Back to Spicer: “Contemplating America from Long Island Sound or the Grail from purity is foolish, not in a bad sense but fool-ish as if words or poetry could save you.” And so when the poetry ends we are left with the mundane details of life. In the final poem in Via, DeVoogd writes:
The train goes past my brother’s house
Over the street five times an hour.
Drank martinis and watched the Oscars
At Sam’s house broke a glass when I reached for
The Doritos. He has a podcast.
Slept in Rob’s bed.
But something does remain when everything is lost. DeVoogd writes in the Endnotes to the book:
The strange movements of language across time manifest overall an uncountable and unaccountable act of love without subject or object, because they are about millions upon millions of living and dying beings endlessly trying to talk to one another.
That’s what’s meant by “Marie de France.” It’s this stubborn talking, the undertow and marvel of it, in these apocalyptic times or any.
What remains is a love “without subject or object,” an “uncountable and unaccountable act of love,” millions living and dying talking to each other. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Something in “God Language. In spite of all this horseshit, this uncomfortable music.”
What matters is not to give up and to continue the conversation between the living and the dead. This is why the poet must be committed to her art. In these present times, when the country, and indeed the world almost, has veered to the Right in its politics, it sometimes seems as though the evil that broods and breeds in the darkness has won the battle waged on the spiritual level between light and darkness, and that the light has receded back into the darkness. But the poet’s work is concerned with this Apocalypse in which she finds a kind of Paradise. To this extent, DeVoogd is a metaphysical poet and as Robert Gluck writes: “Via is a book for visionary readers.” Which is reason enough to get your copy now.
Via, by Claire DeVoogd. New York, New York: Winter Editions, November 2023. 136 pages. $20.00, paper.
Peter Valente is a writer, translator, and filmmaker. He is the author of twelve full length books. His most recent books are a collection of essays on Werner Schroeter, A Credible Utopia (Punctum, 2022), and his translation of Nerval, The Illuminated (Wakefield, 2022). Forthcoming is his translation of Antonin Artaud, The True Story of Jesus-Christ (Infinity Land Press, 2022), a collection of essays on Artaud, Obliteration of the World: A Guide to the Occult Belief System of Antonin Artaud (Infinity Land Press, 2022), and his translation of Nicolas pages by Guillaume Dustan (Semiotext(e), 2023).
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