Jacket Magazine interviews Rachel Zolf

Issue 37 of Jacket features an extensive conversation between Rachel Zolf (Human Resources) and Joel Bettridge about the accelerated pace of Zolf's reading style, her work-in-progress, The Neighbour Procedure, and a great deal more.

Here is a taste from the beginning of the interview:

JB: I've listened to a number of your readings online, and of course I heard you read when you came through Portland in 2007; not surprisingly, the accelerated pace you read at really stood out to me when I had all these readings in my head, so I am wondering if you could talk about why you read at the tempo that you do? What effect are you after? I know you have said that you want to let listeners (or readers) navigate the poems on their own terms, but the pace of your readings is entirely too deliberate for this answer to satisfy me.

RZ: I recently heard Kit Robinson read at the Segue series and there were a great couple lines in his poem 'Atomic Mambo.' They come from a quote attributed to musician Eddie Palmieri: 'When you go fast / You have more time between notes.' I really like the conceptual paradox in these lines, and I'm also reminded of the fullness of Walter Benjamin's 'now-time' (jetztzheit), where past, present and future are coinciding in a moment. These elements speak to the technique I use to read from Human Resources (I read more slowly from other books!).

The complete conversation can be found here: http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-zolf-ivb-bettridge.shtml.