An audience member listens to the soundtrack of X Locus: Abluvion, an installation at the American Academy in Rome, May 2011. Jennifer Scappettone's sound piece emanates from a tract of Trajan's aqueduct underground.

An audience member listens to the soundtrack of X Locus: Abluvion, an installation at the American Academy in Rome, May 2011. Jennifer Scappettone's sound piece emanates from a tract of Trajan's aqueduct underground.

AUDIO COLLECTIONS

Readings, interviews, talks @ Jennifer Scappettone's PennSound author page

Poems and recordings at The Poetry Foundation

PennSound Italiana, edited by Jennifer Scappettone

Profile and poetry recordings at Knox Writers House

SOUND PIECES

X Locus (Abluvion), a sonic plunge into the infrastructure of water, empire, and collapse, with liner notes, 2011 (installed at the American Academy in Rome, first published at textsound

A sonic plunge into the infrastructure of empire and collapse, first installed inside the tract of Trajan's aqueduct that passes below the cryptoporticus of the American Academy in Rome in May 2011. This piece draws upon excerpts of poetic scores by Jennifer Scappettone performed live by the Difforme Ensemble--Marco Ariano (percussion and electronics), Renato Ciunfrini (sampler, contrabass clarinet, voice) and Roberto Fega (electronics), with vocals by Jennifer Scappettone, Ersela Kripa, and Karen Yasinsky--remixed with field recordings made in Roman aqueducts (the Acqua Traiana, Acqua Marcia, and Acqua Claudia), discussions with community members about the fate of monumental waterworks, readings from outmoded chronicles of Roman history, and decodings of the inscriptions to the underworld hovering in the courtyard above. "X Locus: Cryptoporticus (Abluvion)" animates the hollows beneath our feet. Choral utterances emerge from a blighted underground: montages of voices salvaged from the community and from pastoral poetry, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Lewis Carroll's Alice, to sound the metamorphosing role of now-defunct aqueducts in feeding the city, or in spurring deviant behaviors and sieges of empire. In the May 2011 installation, environmental media projections by Stephen Mueller and Ersela Kripa (AGENCY Architecture) and a conversant soundtrack by Paul Rudy reliquefied the corridor that hosts a tract of the 1,902-year-old aqueduct, while from a hole in the floor opening onto the channel itself, Scappettone's poem drew listeners into cycles of use, abuse, and disuse of infrastructure for the public good: portents for our postpastoral moment. Thanks to the artists, scholars, and staff of the American Academy in Rome for their voices in the work: special thanks to chef Mona Talbott and the Rome Sustainable Food Project, archaeologist Gianni Ponti and colleagues at Roma Sotterranea, classicist Andrew Riggsby, and medievalist Lila Yawn.

X Locus (Cortile), a documentary sound collage exploring the courtyard and its underground as a common space of dislocation, with liner notes, 2010 (installed at the American Academy in Rome, first published at textsound)

A sound-poem on national, cultural, linguistic, and psychological crossing and dislocation, first installed at the American Academy in Rome for the collaborative installation X Locus on April 27-28, 2011. Surrounded by a virtual "moat"--a soundtrack of fountains and fowl by composer Paul Rudy, and projections by AGENCY Architecture that rendered the vaults of courtyard arcades liquid--this site-specific sound poem by Jennifer Scappettone invited community members to enter the core of the cortile to listen for the intertwinings and disintertwinings in a narrative loop. "X Locus: Cortile" reconstructs the cacophonous history and presence of this courtyard, shaped by Columbian Exposition architects McKim, Mead, & White in 1913 as a convening space for the Academy--itself a nation-building and nation-expanding project on Rome's Janiculum Hill. In this ephemeral neighborhood, or borgo, of transit defined by the Aurelian Walls of imperial Rome and a sequence of raucous gates, the designations "American" and "Italian" are both sheltered and continually recast as a looping sequence of never-quite arrived-at aspirations, disappointments, researches, and desires. Meanwhile, the rising plants and pastiched funerary inscriptions that line the courtyard remind those who dine in and pass through this space of the anxious and fructifying lives underground. Thanks to the members of the 2010-11 Academy community: chefs, architects and designers, composers, poets, classicists, medievalists, an early modernist, a Serbian linguist, a Tibetan-American singer, an English sculptor and a stone carver, Russian, Cuban, Albanian, and Italian-Dutch installation artists, a bharatnatyam dancer, a painter, a Russian bookmaker, an American and an Italian filmmaker, an Israeli-American doctor, Romanian and Italian baristas, protesters from the streets of the Italian capital, and other comrades eluding categorization, for the sought and found material of their cherished voices. Special thanks to Huck Hodge for tracts from his development of "Pools of Shadow from an Older Sky." First published on textsound here: http://textsound.org/index.php?ISSUE=12

A Copper Lyre (first draft)

This is just another failure at manifesting a hallucinatory panmusic I’ve been dreaming of since I learned that the copper rod mill across the street from my kidhood home on Long Island, responsible for dumping tens of thousands of tons of toxic sludge into an unlined dump across the street in our cancer cluster, received its ore from the Andean Highlands of Peru, in a town where abuses of extraction underground shifted to open-pit mining practices in 1956 and proceeded to swallow places as well as lives at a higher rate than was previously possible.

In every failed attempt at mockup I have imagined the copper wires and cables that provided the basis for modern and contemporary telecommunications as the possible chords of a planet-encompassing instrument similar to the diagram of world attunement in Robert Fludd’s 1617 𝘜𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘶𝘴𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘴𝘮𝘪 𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘵 𝘦𝘵 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢, 𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢 𝘢𝘵𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘢 (𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭, 𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘴𝘮𝘰𝘴) used as a frontispiece for R. Murray Schafer’s classic study of acoustic ecology, The Tuning of the World. This instrument can be discovered and plucked with plectra and digits aplenty behind every wall of the modern world, in piping, wiring, and the multifoliate copper conductors lining our expressive apparatuses. I imagine populating my book with the voices of people living at various points of the vast global circuitry of copper extraction, an industry that is booming in response to the energy “transition” and the demand for ever more massive data centers and supercomputers for AI processing. I would like to enjoin everyone on earth who takes issue with the pollution of water, air, and soil that this will entail to take a moment to pluck this instrument and sing in chorus of the abuses in which we are complicit when we commit the seemingly innocent act of accessing the cloud. Instead of a “world monochord” we would have a world polyphony modeling a way of communing otherwise, in concrete music.

READINGS AND TALKS

POETRY

2 poems from From Dame Quickly @ Drunken Boat

“Writing Through Imagism”: On "Vase Poppies," by Jennifer Scappettone, and H.D.'s "Sea Poppies," at PoemTalk, with Judith Goldman, David Pavelich, Don Share, and Al Filreis

SCHOLARSHIP

On Susan Howe’s Emily Dickinson, with Marcella Durand, Jessica Lowenthal, and Al Filreis at PoemTalk

TRANSLATION

Italian Poetry Now with Milli Graffi, Maria Attanasio, Giovanna Frene, and Marco Giovenale @ Chicago Public Radio