Episode 34: Beat Down the Barriers: Jennifer Scappettone on “Poetry After Barbarism”
In episode #34 I talk with poet, artist, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone about her new book, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism, in which she explores the power of a planetary, xenoglossic poetry of resistance—which is to say, a polyglot poetry that rejects mastery in favor of strangeness, a poetry that exposes how we are all outside of language, speaking and writing in waywardness and errancy. We begin with Jen’s multicultural and translingual upbringing on Long Island, her childhood obsession with the Statue of Liberty, and her time living in Japan as a young adult. We recall our years together as graduate students, and I take the opportunity to confess how I envied and was intimidated by Jen during that time, emotions that eventually transformed into admiration and love. We talk about the complexities of “contamination”: the powerful and necessary contaminations of all languages and cultures as they interact, counterposed against a literal contamination that forms one of Jen’s other obsessions, registered in her work on environmental injustice: the dangerous and often deadly contamination of the land. Jen reads us a poem by the Italian-Jewish poet and musician/musicologist Amelia Rosselli and speaks about Rosselli’s remarkable biography growing up in an antifascist Irish-English/Italian family. Along the way we (of course) speak of our mothers, ask how we might wrest a complicated and difficult beauty from the diseases of our time, and somehow arrive at Genesis I:2 (in multiple translations) and the question of the plurality (infinite) of God(s).
Texts and people discussed:
Theodore Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”
Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry
Lyn Hejinian, The Beginner
Amelia Rosselli: Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, a Bilingual Edition
Jennifer Scappettone, The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump
Music by Ben Roberts : Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com
Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com
Jennifer Scappettone
Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, translational, visual, and scholarly arts, and is Professor of English and romance languages, gender studies, and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Environmental Arts+Humanities Lab. She is the author of five full-length books, including the scholarly monographs Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism and Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice. n the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/De Palchi Award. Her chapbooks include SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts (The Elephants, 2018), featuring librettos for mixed-reality performance with Judd Morrissey and Ava Aviva Avnisan, and as curating poet, with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (Belladonna, 2009), both of which are available for download free of charge. Her current project devoted to the “copper lyre” subtending telecommunications networks, Pennies from Nether, was a finalist for the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Literature.
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