PENNSOUND PODCAST: POETRY AFTER BARBARISM

In this episode of the PennSound podcast, a group gathered to discuss Jennifer Scappettone’s new book, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia University Press, 2025). Al Filreis was joined for this conversation — which took place in the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House on November 4, 2025 — by Jean-Michel Rabaté, Christos Kalli, Paul Saint-Amour, Sophia DuRose, and Jennifer Scappettone herself. Claire Stancek sat in for the conversation as well.

During the conversation, Scappettone answers questions from the group and discusses her poetic and ethical interest in xenoglossia (a word, originally part of the book’s subtitle, that means, essentially, “speaking in tongues”): the use and gathering of many languages into one poetics, and the porousness and interweaving of cultures that all languages partake in. 

This remarkable versatility and diversity of language, and the intensity and openness of reading and teaching that it fosters, serves, Scappettone and the group argue, as a meaningful resistance to fascism and the forces that would narrow us to a brutal monolingualism through use and threat of violence and cultural repressions of all kinds. 

Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, performed, and scholarly arts to rethink the way language shapes our relation to the built and natural environments, and the ways languages may be reshaped to imagine a more just entwinement with the planet. She teaches literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago, and has served as Visiting Professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel.