Rachel Zolf

Janky materiality

Artifice and interface

Jeff T. Johnson

We live in machines but are not machines. Restless forms imagine new presents, where past and future meet. As becoming-digital beings, we retain and engage the problem of embodiment, which needs a world, needs other forms, needs to die. Death is our stake: neither early nor late.

September 13, 2019

Rise and live (PoemTalk #111)

Naomi Replansky, 'In Syrup, In Syrup' and 'Ring Song'

PoemTalk
Naomi Replansky at the Kelly Writers House, November 15, 2016. Photo by KWH staff.

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Ron Silliman, Rachel Zolf, and Charles Bernstein joined Al Filreis to talk about two poems by Naomi Replansky. The poems are “In Syrup, In Syrup” and “Ring Song.” The latter is the title poem of a volume nominated in 1952 for the National Book Award. “In Syrup,” first published under the antiwar title “Dulce Et Decorum” in 1947, its title recalling Wilfred Owen, was revised before Ring Song. “Ring Song” itself was revised for a 1988 chapbook Twenty One Poems Old and New. Replansky’s PennSound page features recent readings of both poems and indicates her final preferences for the revised versions.

April 12, 2017

Polyvocal affects

Rachel Zolf's 'Janey’s Arcadia' in Winnipeg

Heather Milne

Rachel Zolf’s poetry jolts readers from their comfort zone and into a contact zone where they encounter a poetics that is semantically “readable enough” but that conveys its urgency primarily on an affective level through shock, defamiliarization, and a poetics of glitchy error. What Zolf has called “mad affects” are experienced in readerly, textual encounters with her work. They also happen when the text moves off the page and into the realms of the aural, the visual, and the performative.

October 6, 2016

Swear it closed (PoemTalk #103)

Simone White, 'Of Being Dispersed'

PoemTalk
From left to right: Eileen Myles, Erica Kaufman, and Rachel Zolf.

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Rachel Zolf, Eileen Myles, and erica kaufman joined Al Filreis to talk about four short poems from what was then an unpublished typescript of a new book by Simone White. The book is Of Being Dispersed, now available from Futurepoem. White performed these and other poems from the collection at a Segue Series reading at Zinc Bar in New York on January 11, 2014. The work responds in part to George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous. Numerousness, pluralism, plenitude of subjects, objects, and sources, are certainly inclusive influences — but are also extended and even defied here by the agony and ferocity of dispersal, the sexual and racial sense of being pushed out.

August 9, 2016

Mobilizing affects

Rachel Zolf in conversation with Brian Teare, March 2015

Brian Teare
Rachel Zolf

Note: What follows is an edited transcript of PennSound Podcast #48, a March 18, 2015, conversation between Rachel Zolf and Brian Teare. Zolf and Teare discuss Zolf’s most recent book, Janey’s Arcadia, which Teare described in his introduction to Zolf’s reading at Temple University in November 2014 as a work that “situates us in a Canadian national history in which the ideology of nation building prescribes genocide for Indigenous people, and enlists all its settler-subjects in the campaigns of conversion, dislocation, assimilation, and disappearance.”

May 22, 2015

Brian Teare interviews Rachel Zolf

PennSound podcast #48

PennSound podcasts

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On March 18, 2015, Canadian poet Rachel Zolf visited Philadelphia and the Kelly Writers House and came into the Wexler Studio to record a conversation with Brian Teare. Zolf and Teare discussed Zolf’s most recent book, Janey’s Arcadia, which Teare described in his introduction to Zolf’s reading at Temple University in November 2014 as a work that “situates us in a Canadian national history in which the ideology of nation building prescribes genocide for indigenous people, and enlists all its settler-subjects in the campaigns of conversion, dislocation, assimilation, and disappearance.” Zolf created a film, a sound performance, and a number of polyvocal actions related to Janey’s Arcadia and has written recently about the “mad affects” generated by the reading/audience event.

May 22, 2015

Can poetry have a socio-political impact?

Image of Occupy Poetry logo.

While Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” he offers a clarification: “it survives / A way of happening, a mouth.” It is one of the most basic questions in our field, and one that I often hear from students: does poetry matter, and, if so, how? Certainly poetry’s ability to “matter” does not rest on socio-political impact alone. Nevertheless, the question of poetry’s significance alludes to a long debate: is poetry always about poetry — l'art pour l'art — or does poetry serve a societal function. Put in Auden’s terms, what happens when we read or write poetry? — Katie L. Price 

Respondents: Brian Ang, Charles Bernstein, Michael Helsem, Rachel Zolf

A response by Brian Ang

Poetry can have a sociopolitical impact through how it constitutes communities toward forms of struggle adequate to acting on historical conditions. Within historical conditions, the totality of poetry’s social networks breaks down into overlapping communities defined by common aesthetic and political values, an expression of struggles within and between communities over those values.

February 11, 2015

Reconsidering the environment

A review of 'Kindergarde'

Eileen R. Tabios

Children often have the ability to cut to the chase and say something without dissembling.  Within such purity, gems often leave their small mouths, hence the saying, “From the mouth of babes … ” All children possess this capacity, but I suspect that for orphans — or perhaps any child with a difficult (so to speak) background — this ability to swiftly and directly see and analyze is honed.

April 2, 2014

Online survey

The following is a brief survey of four projects — The Tolerance Project, Project Rebuild, endpipe line and The Apostrophe Engine — that either use a website as an interactive forum of collaborative work or collaborate with the web itself to generate work.

July 18, 2011
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