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

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 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

Reading with Forrest Gander and Eiko Otake, Segue Series, Artists Space, NYC

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