Interviews

Editorial note: This exchange between Jordan Scott and NourbeSe Philip, undertaken in 2016 and just now published in Jacket2, centers on the role of spirituality in Philip’s book Zong!, which Evie Shockley has said “enacts a critique, but also effects a catharsis or, more accurately, works through a problem that lies at the intersection of the emotions, the psyche, and the soul, if such a thing can be spoken of in the twenty-first century’s secular spaces.” 

Note: I have long been interested in Andrew Levy’s poetry. He and I have corresponded, and in recent years have read and performed together in New York, so we are familiar with one another’s approaches. Fragmented, collaged, passionate, engaged, the trajectory of Andrew’s work over the nearly thirty years of his publishing seems particularly suited to poetry’s jagged and provisional responses to the present moment in which the apparently out-of-control social and political situation we had been in for some years veered way out of orbit since the presidential election of 2016.