Last week, Graywolf Press released Civil Service, the debut poetry collection by Jewish Currents Culture Editor Claire Schwartz. The book is a daring study of the violence woven into our world, from everyday encounters to the material of language itself. The poems unfold in three main sequences: a quartet of lyric lectures, a fragmentary narrative that follows a cast of archetypal figures named for the coordinates of their complicities with power—the Dictator, the Curator, the Accountant, and so on—and a series of interrogation scenes centered on a spectral, fugitive figure named Amira, who gives us a glimpse of another world. To celebrate the release of Civil Service, Schwartz spoke with Managing Editor Nathan Goldman and the book’s editor at Graywolf Press, Chantz Erolin, about the book, as well as poems by Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès that deeply informed it. They discussed dispersed responsibility for state violence, thinking as feeling, and the political possibilities of poetry.

Works Mentioned:

Civil Service by Claire Schwartz

“Lecture on Loneliness” by Claire Schwartz

“Mourning and Melancholia” by Sigmund Freud

“The Felt House That Moves Us: A Conversation with Saretta Morgan,” a conversation with Muriel Leung and Joey De Jesus

“The Concept of Character in Fiction” by William H. Gass

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

“Death Fugue” by Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris

“Stretto” by Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris

“Celan’s Ferryman,” a conversation between Fanny Howe and Pierre Joris

Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis

“Robin Coste Lewis: ‘Black Joy is My Primary Aesthetic,’” a conversation between Claire Schwartz and Robin Coste Lewis

The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop

“Rosmarie Waldrop: The Nick of Time,” a conversation with David Naimon 

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, trans. Anthea Bell

“The Ga(s)p” by M. NourbeSe Philip

“Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present” by David S. Wallace

Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno

Reconsidering Reparations by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

“Assuming the Perspective of the Ancestor,” a conversation between Claire Schwartz and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

“Perennial” by Claire Schwartz

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”