Episode 34: Beat Down the Barriers: Jennifer Scappettone on “Poetry After Barbarism”
From Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone by Julie Carr
April 29, 2026 · 1h 4m · Season 3 · Episode 15
About this episode
Julie Carr interviews Jennifer Scappettone about her book on poetry as a form of resistance and the complexities of language and contamination.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Julie Carr
Guest: Jennifer Scappettone
Topics covered
- poetry
- resistance
- multicultural upbringing
- environmental injustice
- language
- fascism
Keywords
- poetry
- resistance
- fascism
- environmental injustice
- multicultural
- language
- Amelia Rosselli
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism
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