ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Jennifer Scappettone
General Questions
1)
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
In a Levittownlike settlement near New York City. I hung out at the Walt
Whitman Mall (his birthplace is across Route 110). They decided to inscribe
pieces of Leaves of Grass upon the circumfacade years after I left.
Early on my grandmother gave me the talismanish semifluourescent Hop on Pop
which I started to read one day in a cereal closet thanks to television and
quickly took to reading cereal boxes and reciting commercials for the Bronx Zoo
and Connect Four and so forth. I read my way out of there by devouring
everything at the public library around the corner from my house, not
necessarily poetry. I was exposed to a decent amount of scat and theatrics as a
kid; my father was once a jazz musician, and my family was big, loud, and
interruptive. I couldn’t have identified, at the time, the amalgamating
languages that surrounded me in the general nightmare of Paumanok: bastardized
Neapolitan, Yiddish, Hindi, Japanese, solecisms galore. A bottomless store.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
Everything I name blots out the thousand points of the gamut I couldn’t in a tiny space but here goes. Amplifying rage at the current regime and its long history is an influence. Strangers I have met are an influence. My thinking has always been steered by getting lost in public spaces or museums or repositories of garbage (I excavated two once) & I’ve squandered a lot of my time gaping at art. Currently I’m crazy about David Smith because I’m supposed to be thinking about Smithson or Brancusi or Jenny Holzer and Rachel Whiteread. Writing by Walter Pater and Tim Clark and Meyer Schapiro has been an incentive to continue looking, and so has work that is both writing and non from Italian narrative painting through Jackson Mac Low or Carl Dreyer and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
I hate hero worship, but I’m indebted to the usual lot, lyrically speaking, prePetrarchite through postHopkins, and to the digressions of Ruskin, lackful architecture of Henry James, and errata of Pound in translation. &: Zukofsky. Joyce, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison. The Frankfurt school, with their attention to the junked and elliptical paragraphs. The prose of Freud, Dewey, Foucault, Carson…. And the Japanese language, which I haven’t (yet) learned well enough to read Issa and Kawabata in the original as I first intended; it was so absorbing from an alien perspective that even intermediate grasp spurred a ton of (non-speakerly) thinking. Some coordinates of a geography of attention to contemporary poetry: the talkiness of the so-called New York School coursing through Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley; L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and its effluvia in the West (particularly the women of that school, as it happens); the exalted idiom and archaism of Lisa Robertson and discursive estrangements of other Kootenay writers; the Marche miniscene, and Brazilians like Josely Vianna Baptista that Chris Daniels has lately translated to Angloland. (If only more translations were being printed in this myopic kingdom.) For placelessness, you can’t avoid Ashbery, though Mathews is more agonizing. Off to the Midwest, now: will Chicago be like the beloved “dead water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the wreck?”
Ultimately, reciprocal
influence is most momentous, isn’t it? My friends, who know who they are.
3) When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?
I was introduced to
Language poetry while undergoing excruciating linguistic defamiliarization—as I
was trying to turn syntax and expressive capacities inside out in order to get
through the supermarket, for example—through American, Kiwi, and Japanese ESL
teachers & noise musicians in a provincially administered Japanese metropolis.
In my second year there I spent lots of time writing and devising with other
eccentrics and melancholics in different media—music, installation, zines. In
the Bay Area, poetry really besieged my daily life: curating readings, talks,
and potlucks on poetics (with Lyn Hejinian, Joshua Clover, and Julie Carr),
making up a close reading group with poet/comrades, picnicking with Buuck’s
BARGE detours through depleted zones, talking about anything with Judith & Lyn,
and going to a zillion readings and screenings and performances, with the
attendant debauchery and hilarity afterwards, all made poetry a collective
and/or a shared thing.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
All of the above has constituted an education, but officially, at public schools. That aspect of it has been significant, to me, the more because class is so violently effaced within the US academy and high culture. The creative strategies students have to develop to get through the schools I studied at sets these institutions off from private peers. I crawled into writing through drama in high school, and became increasingly starryeyed while taking workshops and trying to counter the stultifying conservatism at UVA (site of the largest pro-(first)-Gulf-War rally in the country) by writing essays and collaborative lefty ditties for a newsmagazine. I couldn’t stomach the sacrament of the certain MFA program (Tan Lin, who got to UVA as I was leaving, was the only writer there who could have attuned the youngster me to oppositional schools) and a lot of the poetry coming out of there depressed me. So I went far away from English altogether for a while. It turns out that Berkeley is an amazing place for writers due precisely to its lack of an MFA; the critical/intellectual and the creative are not so butchered apart there as at other places.
5) Since we are both Italians and Italophiles I have a question for you; do you consider yourself an American writer, Italian American Writer, American Writer of Italian descent and sensibility? Or something else.
I reckon I’m as
uncomfortable identifying myself as an Italian American as I am identifying
myself as an American; the liaison across the implicit hypen could suggest that
one identifies with such grotesquely nostalgic rites as Columbus Day or the
hypermachismo or the sort of disjunction from current life in Italy that allows
citizens dwelling outside its borders to prop up the ludicrous and nefarious
right wing. But I’m marked by both (mutually transmogrifying) cultures
regardless. Italy was both “in” us, semitribally, and intimately removed, some
enchanted remote repository of History, until I constructed my own odd tortuous
relation to it. I can’t imagine that I would relish watching Tony Soprano
squirm at the shrink so much if I hadn’t grown up under the pall of The
Godfather.
6) What is your favorite food?
Fingerproduced pasta with truffles. Ceviches with pumpkin seed salsa.
Okonomiyaki. Flower salad (actually abundant in Berkeley). Coffee granitas
(con panna). On regular days, mustard.
7) Sports Team?
This one is easier, since
sports teams resemble nation-states way too much for me to actually get behind
them.
8) Vacation Spot?
I don’t really do
vacations, but I’m mad about Umbria, where I once lived, and New York, and
Northern California. I hope to be lucky enough always to live in places that
don’t require vacative antidotes.
9) Curse Word?
Bush. Frikin, as in Good Frikin Chicken, could be a close second. I’ve been told that I recur to its classic and by now nonexpletive ancestor profusely, but I’m trying to behave here.
10) You did your dissertation on Venice as an alternate locale of the avant garde- what was your thesis?
The dissertation is based on the premise that liminal and “dead” places have designs on us as ferocious as our designs upon them, and argues that the mandates of modernity vacillate between progress-obsessed hurtlings into a spanking blank future and fantasies of return to the antediluvian lagoon—that amnesia and nostalgia are wedded to each other, that is. It argues that a vengefully obsolescent Venice emerges in modern literature not as a pastoral setting, but as a sort of disease of the regressive stance, forcing literary accounts that actually heed the residual histories entrenched in the place to rout the reigning nostalgic structures of their period.
10 a) Are you disturbed by the Fascist nature of some members of the Italian avant garde such as the Futurists, D' Annunzio, and many others?
I was drawn to post-Romantic Venice as a “passéist” site (to quote Marinetti’s manifesto against it) that presented a structural obstacle to the Fascist blueprint, albeit an infinitely seductive one. I wanted to understand the ways that femininity, fluidity, foreignness, and decadence were, and are, intermittently annihilated and appropriated within totalitarian and nationalist discourse. Poring through some of the material was nearly unbearable; D’Annunzio’s Il fuoco took me a month before I had to face Mafarka le Futuriste and the ranting of the radio Pound. But many of the tropes these texts and the ideologies that impel them rely upon are still pervasive, so it’s important to continue grappling. On the other hand, the whole time I was writing about Fascist authors, I was also translating the poems of Amelia Rosselli, a leftist poet and composer whose father was killed while in exile in France by Mussolini’s order—and whose work articulates a mordant aftermath of (and answer to) Fascism.
10 b) Do you find that Italian writing today is very experimental?
I don’t think that Italian literary circles are structurally very open to experiment; Rosselli’s marginality is one example of their suspicion of barbarism and the non sequitur. The Italian literary establishment seems to share some qualities of the feudal Italian academy. Andrea Zanzotto and Giorgio Agamben are among the most provocative authors working anywhere in spite of that.
11) What is your goal during your fellowship at Wesleyan?
I’ll be attending seminars
and teaching a course on culture and public policy—a topic I’ve been drawn to
more and more since 9/11—while revising the Venice manuscript, starting new
poetry books, and recommuning with longlost homies in the Northeast.
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem?
I don’t know exactly. When I come up against a problem that enrages or delights me (the former being a lot more frequent, unfortunately), something I can’t parse in direct discursive form, I carve out a space in which the words can arrange an answer or retort that I would never come up with if puny intention alone were driving the thing. I envy architects and archaeologists, though I’m more like their inverse. The concrete and cognitive shapes of two intertwining series in my manuscript, “Beauty [Is the New Absurdity]” and “The New War,” were modeled after the form of the square—as a public space through which discourse or material practices stream and clash, in the former series, and as an imprisoning frame in the other. Language battles it out within those spaces. The process for upcoming poems will be different—it would be tragic if any answer to this question remained accurate for long.
2) Do you always use images from pop culture, music and other outside
stimuli?
Yes, I’m more interested
in what you call outside stimuli than in my own cloistered narratives, if it’s
possible to distinguish between the two. I mentioned some outside sources in
another answer, but yes, music and dancing have been beloved channels of solace
and sparse insight for me, always. I’ve oscillated painfully between the
popular and the obscure. And between the new and the outmoded.
3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
I’ve been too dorkily
engrossed by the thwarted transition from organism to mechanism over the turn of
the twentieth century to respond concisely. It’s synthetic, but humanoid.
4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
It depends, since the poem
is site-inflected before becoming a site itself. Ambience is important if you
pronounce it with an “eh” instead of an “ah.” I imagine writing less and less
upon a blank, more and more amidst a buzz, whether it’s the buzz of human
traffic, or the web (news, history, advertising, propaganda), or some sculpted
cacophony of books. I had to work to make a habit of being somehow rigorously
open to contingency. I think best while biking because its somatic monotony
lulls me into rehearsing (mp3-soundtracked) sounds and concepts whether I mean
it to or not.
5) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?
There’s a wavering ratio and a range. The two poles aren’t finally discrete. The square poems I talked about were obsessed by publicity, so they collected a lot of fallout language found and recombined. More and more I’ve been going to (supposed) channels of information as (supposedly) opposed to those of “culture” for sources. Images or narratives or structures at large infiltrate and reroute or encode the first nonexpurgated stab or stratum of a poem and vice versa. Or messages are superimposed upon one another many times over until pieces of the initial one fall away. And so [nohow] on.
Some of Jen’s writing on the web:
Poems:
http://www.canwehaveourballback.com/17scappettone.htm
(best viewed if the web browser window is very wide)
http://www.thebrooklynrail.org/poetry/june04/scappettone.html
Translations:
http://www.circumferencemag.com/issue2/issue2c.html
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3692/is_200207/ai_n9123519
Sound:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Segue-BPC.html
Other poetry & prose appears or is forthcoming in 26, 580 Split, Aufgabe, Back to Front, Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2005), Berkeley Poetry Review, Boston Review, Chain, Chicago Review, Commonweal, Enough (O Books, 2003), Five Fingers Review, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Mon Zen, The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner, 2004), The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Poker, Viz., Volt, War and Peace Volume II (O Books, 2005), and Xantippe.
