Episode 18: And yet, not yet: a trans-poetics: Syd Zolf
In episode 18, I talk with poet and theorist Syd Zolf about two of their recent projects, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics, a critical book that draws from Black studies as it engages the problem of witnessing atrocity, and NEUTRØIS, a forthcoming book of poems. We talk about grief and loss, intergenerational trauma, the notion of the unanswerable question as a foundational Jewish practice, and the idea of witnessing from the position of the “no one.” We explore citational writing, procedural writing, and finding language outside of language. How can we respond to other people’s pain? What is the difference (is there one?) between “living” and “thinking”? How might we find our way to a secular messianic hope? And how can we recognize and remember that we are “already here, already connected, already dancing”?
Texts, interviews, and authors mentioned or discussed
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation
Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh, Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman and Julie Carr, “To Begin (again) with Justice: Prof. Almút Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh & House of Taswir” on Return the Key
Paul Celan, “Ashglory” translated by Pierre Joris
Denise Ferreira da Silva, "On Difference Without Separability"
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
Laura Harris, “What Happened to the Motley Crew?: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness”
Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, translated by Rosemary Waldrop
Bhanu Kapil, Schizophrene, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Ban En Banlieue
Robert Majzels, Apikoros Sleuth
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!
Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
Rosemary Waldrop, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
Larry Zolf vs. Germaine Greer
Syd Zolf, Her absence, this wanderer; Masque; Neighbour Procedure; No One’s Witness: a Monstrous Poetics; Janey's Arcadia
Syd Zolf
Syd Zolf’s interdisciplinary practice explores questions about history, knowledge, subjectivity, responsibility, and the limits of language, meaning, and the human. Zolf’s work queerly enacts how ethics founders on the shoals of the political, imagining other possibilities of sociality, space, and time. They have published five books of poetry, including Janey’s Arcadia, Neighbour Procedure, and Human Resources; and a selected poetry, Social Poesis. Honors include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Trillium Book Award for Poetry, several major grants, and finalist for several other prizes, including two Lambda Literary Awards. Zolf’s art films have screened at venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam and White Cube Bermondsey. Their theoretical text, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Duke, 2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Zolf lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Their sixth book of poetry, NEUTRØIS, will be published by Coach House Books in early 2027.
Return the Key
Jewish Questions for Everyone
