Via. Claire DeVoogd. Winter Editions, 2023. 136 pages.

The breakdown of infrastructure is a persistent theme in contemporary life. We are saturated with stories of failing public works: sinkholes swallow roads, bridges collapse, water systems fail. At the time of writing, the water has been turned off for thirty-six hours where I live in South East London. Thames Water is constantly in crisis, unable to maintain the infrastructure it was privatized to improve. The company hemorrhages money while indefinitely deferring basic maintenance. As literary scholar Dominic Davies notes in The Broken Promise of Infrastructure, the hopeful rhetoric around infrastructure—always a sign of progress—often masks the reality of systemic neglect. Davies uses the phrase “infrastructures of feeling,” a play on Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” to describe the emotional weight of these systems. Claire DeVoogd’s capacious collection Via, taps into this weight, its poetry surveying the affect of erosion and decay, of interrupted paths and obstructed flows.

The opening poem ‘Siste Viator’ (Latin for “Stop, Traveler”), implies that the poem is a stoppage, a traffic jam, an interruption. “Via” means way and road. Infrastructure requires maintenance—you can see them all the time, people in high-vis vests, watching a colleague down in a hole. Infrastructure so often remains unseen, as if on the infrared spectrum, especially in our homes—electrical wires and water pipes, things we depend on but hardly understand. Via explores infrastructure, not only in a literal sense—roads, architecture, and systems—but also the infrastructure of language and tradition, infrastructures made most overt in citation and acknowledgement, but also pervasive in our inherited structures of speech and form.

Blockage is inseparable from gaps and cracks in Via, most visibly present in the motif of holes. In the section “Errands,” subtitled “a correspondence with Marie de France,” DeVoogd speaks of “holes in reality.” The poem ‘There’ asserts “at [a] crossroads” that “The world is holes”. These holes are not to be simply patched up, it isn’t as easily recoverable as that. What is important is living with leaks, loss, and difficulty. In Via, these holes threaten to swallow everything. Consider the following lines:

... From the lean-to 

The landscape comes to form 
And it is for you, the one who goes around
The holes where there’s no traction

That there is “no traction” implies risk and slippage, an instability that makes movement uncertain. The holes might be potholes or sinkholes—the traveler in Via navigates a landscape whose ground is unreliable.

Infrastructure is often invisible because it functions like a precondition. It is there so that other things can exist. Via has many preconditions, precedents, antecedents, precursors, and it addresses them in the way you might sing a song, not just on the road, but to the road. That’s how I hear Via’s correspondence with Marie de France. Then there’s all the poems “after” other poets, poets like Chaucer, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Henry Dumas, Ezra Pound, and Katerina Gogou. These names are just the most visible, exposed parts of the poetic infrastructure DeVoogd invites us to relish. In an interview, she speaks of Via as a book written in the midst of “some sort of apocalypse defined by everything cracking.” She describes trying to “buckle together” fragments of words, trying to hold together a crumbling world. The book is filled with architectural and interior design metaphors that recall transitional spaces: exposed pipes, unfinished wood, repurposed materials. This aesthetic—reminiscent of warehouse conversions—foregrounds that infrastructure is constantly being patched up, salvaged, repurposed, restored. But the book does not merely celebrate this aesthetic, espoused by so many minimalist coffee table book style guides. Via embraces what might be called a homely apocalypse. In one poem, DeVoogd writes: “city becomes a home for sunflowers.” This could be the sublime of abandoned cities reclaimed by nature with a foot pressed down hard on the damper pedal, or it could just be a reframing, a shift in architectural priorities.

Fredric Jameson famously described postmodern architecture as emblematic of late capitalism’s fragmented temporality, a pastiche of historical styles torn from their original meaning. DeVoogd’s infrastructure and architecture are not pastiche but salvage work. Every layer of architectural history coexists. In the poem ‘Dream (as a physical frustration),’ we enter “the interior cemetery,” described as “some sheer glass / postmodern architecture library.” Postmodern architecture is relegated to a cemetery: this is natural, since every building is a gravestone. Much of the infrastructure and buildings around us are the result of labor of people who are no longer with us. In an archaeological sense, we can understand the dead (including people from the very distant past) through the products of their labor (ruins, buildings). Our language too is an evolutionary product of the insights and work (the effort) of the dead. These immense products need constant maintenance and upkeep, and DeVoogd’s poetry is an act of maintenance and repair. But it also knows that repair is not always possible. Sometimes things fall apart. What kind of speech, she asks, might maintain what has come before? How does one repair or hold that which is mid-crumbling?

The final poem in Via, ‘Boustrophedon,’ is a tour de force. The title refers to an ancient Greek writing style in which lines alternate direction, moving back and forth like an ox plowing a field. That plowing exposes, and churns up, a textual “stratigraphy,” layers of sedimented poetic language. Discussing DeVoogd’s book, Abraham Adams describes how materials that did not coexist historically appear together, and I find that illustrated beautifully here:

Come out of your basement
Door and make a pledge, it is the only
Kind of language to be loved, manager.

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

These strophes come after an invocation of late-stage capitalist production (mass-produced artificial chrysanthemums) and move on to professions of love which could be read as almost courtly (“make a pledge [...] to be loved”), only to immediately jolt the reader into contemporary corporate language (“manager”), before switching tack to manifesto-like pronouncements which feel straight out of early twentieth-century Modernism (“I believe now that the only way possible is INVERSION”), and then moves on to a deeply contemporary sense of futility and “wreckage.” This is the correlate in poetry to the architectural or interior-design style that preserves original materials and works around them, buildings which show bits of wattle and daub from the deep past alongside medium-density fiberboard. That interjection of “manager” feels like an exposed electrical slapped onto the old bricks of an eighteenth-century warehouse wall. 

In her ‘Endnote’, DeVoogd says Via follows “the strange movements of language across time.” “These movements manifest an uncountable and unaccountable act of love without subject or object,” she writes, “because they are about millions upon millions of living and dying beings endlessly trying to talk to one another.” Via is a road, but it is not the kind of road we are accustomed to—a road that divides, that erases, that turns the natural world into infrastructure. Instead, it is a road on which one can see, if one squints, all those voices trying to speak to one another. That is its traffic. DeVoogd ends the endnote by saying, “That’s what’s meant by ‘Marie de France.’” And maybe that’s what’s meant by “Claire DeVoogd” too.

What has already been built? What is crumbling? What can be salvaged? And what must be let go? In asking these questions, Via understands that poetry itself is an infrastructure—one that, like our roads and bridges, is always in need of maintenance, repair, and sometimes demolition.