Books by Jennifer Scappettone
As a city that seems to float in the margin between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the... more As a city that seems to float in the margin between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic clichés, provoking modern artists and intellectuals to construct conflicting responses: while some embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice’s labyrinthine premodern form and temporality, others aspire to modernize by “killing the moonlight” of Venice, in the Futurists’ notorious phrase.
Spanning literary, art and architectural history from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover, Killing the Moonlight tracks the material and ideological pressures that modernity has placed on the legacy of romantic Venice—and the distinctive strains of aesthetic invention that resulted from the clash. Whether seduced or repulsed by literary clichés of Venetian decadence, post-Romantic artists found a motive for innovation in Venice. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic urban fabric and vestigial sentiment that both the nation-state of Italy and the historical avant-garde would cast off become incompletely assimilated parts of the new.
Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a living city rather than a metaphor for death, and presents the archipelago as a crucible for those seeking to define and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, Scappettone charts an elusive "extraterritorial" modernism that compels us to redraft the confines of modernist culture in both geographical and historical terms.
THE REPUBLIC OF EXIT 43 is a verbal/visual archaeology of the hazardous waste sites across the st... more THE REPUBLIC OF EXIT 43 is a verbal/visual archaeology of the hazardous waste sites across the street from home and school, tucked behind the portal of an expressway: domains mute and seemingly inert. Composting Alice's adventures underground, verse channels unearthed disputes surrounding a noxious landfill and adjoining copper rod mill through the throats of nether and overworlds, from Eurydice to CEOs—mining landscape as retribution, baffle, legal battle and real estate speculation, deregulation, rogue digging and pastoral pipe dreams on the part of the harmed. Amidst the stupefaction of innumerable private and state ruses, these pages lay out how the entrails of postwar industry might be reclaimed toward a music of non–consensual citizenship where poetry is unregulated and fully integral.
A musician, musicologist, and self-defined “poet of research,” Amelia Rosselli (1930–96) was one ... more A musician, musicologist, and self-defined “poet of research,” Amelia Rosselli (1930–96) was one of the most important poets to emerge from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Following a childhood and adolescence spent in exile from Fascist Italy between France, England, and the United States, Rosselli was driven to express the hopes and devastations of the postwar epoch through her demanding and defamiliarizing lines. Rosselli’s trilingual body of work synthesizes a hybrid literary heritage stretching from Dante and the troubadours through Ezra Pound and John Berryman, in which playful inventions across Italian, English, and French coexist with unadorned social critique. In a period dominated by the confessional mode, Rosselli aspired to compose stanzas characterized by a new objectivity and collective orientation, “where the I is the public, where the I is things, where the I is the things that happen.” Having chosen Italy as an “ideal fatherland,” Rosselli wrote searching and often discomposing verse that redefined the domain of Italian poetics and, in the process, irrevocably changed the Italian language.
This collection, the first to bring together a generous selection of her poems and prose in English and in translation, is enhanced by an extensive critical introduction and notes by translator Jennifer Scappettone. Equipping readers with the context for better apprehending Rosselli’s experimental approach to language, Locomotrix seeks to introduce English-language readers to the extraordinary career of this crucial, if still eclipsed, voice of the twentieth century.
New York: Belladonna Books, Apr 15, 2009
This collection brought together by Jennifer Scappettone for Belladonna* features her preface on ... more This collection brought together by Jennifer Scappettone for Belladonna* features her preface on "Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse," introducing Etel Adnan's "Celestial Cities," Lyn Hejinian's "Six Positions of the Sun," and pop-up pastorals from Scappettone's 2017 book The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump.
2009 marked the tenth anniversary of Belladonna*'s mission to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Belladonna* has featured over 150 writers of wildly diverse age and origin, writers who work in conversation and collaboration within and between multiple forms, languages, and critical fields. As performance and as printed text, the work collects, gathers over time and space, and forms a kind of conversation about the feminist avant-garde: what it is and how it comes to be. The anniversary Elders Series is a continuation of this conversation, which highlights the fact of influence and continuity of the ideas, poetics, and concerns we circle through.
These texts for SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED; Or, Last year / By constant penetration / Encroa... more These texts for SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED; Or, Last year / By constant penetration / Encroaching on the reserve, a mock musical in progress, were produced by mining the code book of C. Algernon Moreing, Mining Engineer of the Montana Company, Limited, & the Mines Company, Limited, in tandem with ongoing research into the history and future of copper exploitation. Telegrams housed in Michigan Tech’s Copper Country Historical Collections clarify the various ways in which the telegraph was used to bridle the laborers who constituted the corporal infrastructure of that technology. Baroque code compounds store the brute links between bodies, metal, and the market, sometimes sanitizing, at other times proving grossly expressive. The acts focus on the great strike of 1913 at the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula—a bloody conflict provoked by the introduction of a hazardous economizing tool into the mines: the one-man compressed air drill, known to scholars of modernism through its glorification in the form of sculptor Jacob Epstein’s 1914 readymade Rock-Drill.
An interview with Leonard Schwartz about the psychogeography of the archipelago and lagoon, follo... more An interview with Leonard Schwartz about the psychogeography of the archipelago and lagoon, following publication of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism and Venice.
See Litmus Press page for Scappettone's "Passi / between tongues / towards a poetics of research."
Papers by Jennifer Scappettone
In a 1989 essay titled “To Write in a Foreign Language,” Etel Adnan describes the trajectory of h... more In a 1989 essay titled “To Write in a Foreign Language,” Etel Adnan describes the trajectory of her relationship to Arabic, a language associated with shame and sin in the context of her French education in Beirut, but which her Syrian father had her copy by rote from an Arabic-Turkish grammar as a desperate means of recuperation. Her family’s common languages were Turkish and French; of the Arabic letters whose knowledge Adnan acquired through a channel more somatic than semantic. During the Algerian war of independence, when a dream of Arab unity emerged, Adnan’s attitude to the languages of her inheritance changed: “I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.” How does this dream, itself transitory, constitute itself in Adnan’s works? And how are readers to read across the sometimes unintelligible sign systems that result? This chapter will explore the geopolitical implications of Adnan’s “xenoglossic” poetics, which sporadically merges the mediums of writing and painting, to contemplate how her practices of transcription and supralinguistic gesture enable us to revise reigning discursive categories of cultural nativity and solidarity, citizenship and statelessness.
This essay for Dimensions of Citizenship, the theme of the US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Archit... more This essay for Dimensions of Citizenship, the theme of the US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, addresses citizenship at the scale of the Globe by presenting two New York City monuments—the Statue of Liberty and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—as expressions of a smelted citizenry generating and suffering from the transnational copper extraction economy. The piece argues that this global network of exploitation demanded by the electrification and advanced telecommunications systems of modernity testifies against the fiction of the US as melting pot.
Poetics and Precarity, ed. Cristanne Miller and Myung Mi Kim (SUNY Press), 2018
Nathaniel Mackey’s “Breath and Precarity” begins by invoking Charles Olson’s canonical 1950 appea... more Nathaniel Mackey’s “Breath and Precarity” begins by invoking Charles Olson’s canonical 1950 appeal for emphasis on the poetic line’s origins in “the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes,” noting the ambient influence of this bid that hovered “in the air” of postwar poetry circles, yet wondering if “anything instructional or curricular ever came of the call for more attentiveness to breath among poets.” Mackey’s question is by no means limited to the literary sphere or its curricula. A resurgence of attention to the constricting “laws and possibilities of the breath” since July 17, 2014—a necessary consequence of the horror of Eric Garner’s murder by chokehold, ostensibly triggered by the petty offense of selling loosies on the street—has shown how socially instructive our scrutiny of laws of the breath can be. It has led to a collective expansion and reframing, on social media and beyond, of Frantz Fanon’s 1952 statement that oppressed people have revolted because “in many respects it became impossible…to breathe”—as if classical promises of civil justice and arbitration through the discursive public sphere were deemed exhausted under existing political structures, on a massive scale. The charge with which Garner leaves us—to reevaluate the laws and possibilities of the breath at this moment—drives us once more to the seemingly arcane realm of poetics, a counterdiscursive sphere of activity that takes inspiration as its founding trope. Seeking to excavate the obscured site of breathing in intellectual culture as it exceeds the ableist and patriarchal presumptions of Olson’s “Projective Verse,” this essay turns to the utopian feminist philosophy of Adriana Cavarero, and then to lyric invocations and theorizations of breath that help ground Cavarero’s ideals in a dystopian historical moment. Mackey’s lecture surrounding the instructional utility of an emphasis on breath prepares us for this trajectory by expanding the political horizons of Olson’s “verse” through rectifying emphasis on performing against, and as, sociopolitical duress.
The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time, Edited by Charles Altieri and Nicholas D. Nace. Northwestern University Press, 2017
Moderna, 2013
This essay glosses the political conceptualism of Amelia Rosselli through the lens of her ‘new ge... more This essay glosses the political conceptualism of Amelia Rosselli through the lens of her ‘new geometrism’, inflected by the open-field poetics of Charles Olson on the one hand, and by the dialectic between non-intentionality and constraint, freedom and imprisonment explored by practitioners of the New Music on the other. The phrase ‘Disintegratedcantons’ in an early riposte to the neoavanguardia links Rosselli’s formal research with a political aspiration (or trauma) : the dream (or nightmare) of a ‘total’ language, poised to host all possible rhythms, yet ultimately giving rise to the discomposing syntheses of transnational clashes. Atomic metaphors in Pasolini’s readings of Rosselli's first published Italian poems elicit the force of these clashes : Rosselli generates a post-Enlightenment poetics, exposing the violent unreason stemming from the programmatic disenchantment of history.
Ambient music enjoys a certain circulation in today's aesthetic discourse and cultural criticism ... more Ambient music enjoys a certain circulation in today's aesthetic discourse and cultural criticism as well as our malls; coined by Brian Eno in the mid-1970s, contextualized by prominent precursors in the compositions of Erik Satie, Pierre Schaeffer, and John Cage, the phrase already vaunts historical authority. But what might the term ambient as applied to poetry and poetics designate? Reverberation of those sonic trends within the trappings of lines and stanzas? An ekphrastic phenomenon, belated? Or something more literal, involving verbal assumption of or diffusion into abounding space?
Critical Inquiry, 2011
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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Books by Jennifer Scappettone
Spanning literary, art and architectural history from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover, Killing the Moonlight tracks the material and ideological pressures that modernity has placed on the legacy of romantic Venice—and the distinctive strains of aesthetic invention that resulted from the clash. Whether seduced or repulsed by literary clichés of Venetian decadence, post-Romantic artists found a motive for innovation in Venice. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic urban fabric and vestigial sentiment that both the nation-state of Italy and the historical avant-garde would cast off become incompletely assimilated parts of the new.
Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a living city rather than a metaphor for death, and presents the archipelago as a crucible for those seeking to define and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, Scappettone charts an elusive "extraterritorial" modernism that compels us to redraft the confines of modernist culture in both geographical and historical terms.
This collection, the first to bring together a generous selection of her poems and prose in English and in translation, is enhanced by an extensive critical introduction and notes by translator Jennifer Scappettone. Equipping readers with the context for better apprehending Rosselli’s experimental approach to language, Locomotrix seeks to introduce English-language readers to the extraordinary career of this crucial, if still eclipsed, voice of the twentieth century.
2009 marked the tenth anniversary of Belladonna*'s mission to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Belladonna* has featured over 150 writers of wildly diverse age and origin, writers who work in conversation and collaboration within and between multiple forms, languages, and critical fields. As performance and as printed text, the work collects, gathers over time and space, and forms a kind of conversation about the feminist avant-garde: what it is and how it comes to be. The anniversary Elders Series is a continuation of this conversation, which highlights the fact of influence and continuity of the ideas, poetics, and concerns we circle through.
Papers by Jennifer Scappettone
Spanning literary, art and architectural history from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover, Killing the Moonlight tracks the material and ideological pressures that modernity has placed on the legacy of romantic Venice—and the distinctive strains of aesthetic invention that resulted from the clash. Whether seduced or repulsed by literary clichés of Venetian decadence, post-Romantic artists found a motive for innovation in Venice. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic urban fabric and vestigial sentiment that both the nation-state of Italy and the historical avant-garde would cast off become incompletely assimilated parts of the new.
Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a living city rather than a metaphor for death, and presents the archipelago as a crucible for those seeking to define and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, Scappettone charts an elusive "extraterritorial" modernism that compels us to redraft the confines of modernist culture in both geographical and historical terms.
This collection, the first to bring together a generous selection of her poems and prose in English and in translation, is enhanced by an extensive critical introduction and notes by translator Jennifer Scappettone. Equipping readers with the context for better apprehending Rosselli’s experimental approach to language, Locomotrix seeks to introduce English-language readers to the extraordinary career of this crucial, if still eclipsed, voice of the twentieth century.
2009 marked the tenth anniversary of Belladonna*'s mission to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Belladonna* has featured over 150 writers of wildly diverse age and origin, writers who work in conversation and collaboration within and between multiple forms, languages, and critical fields. As performance and as printed text, the work collects, gathers over time and space, and forms a kind of conversation about the feminist avant-garde: what it is and how it comes to be. The anniversary Elders Series is a continuation of this conversation, which highlights the fact of influence and continuity of the ideas, poetics, and concerns we circle through.