Rachel Zolf’s newest collection of poetry, Human Resources, has just been released by Coach House Books. In it, Zolf attempts to become a writing machine, producing a poetry of daily experience, but not necessarily her own. Believing that there is no one, clear, containable “voice” for a writer, she has developed a way to produce poetry that combines “the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words.” As she commented in an interview with Rob McLennan in 2006, “I no longer hope I’ll open the fridge one day and my Self will pop out.”

Like many writers and poets who move into interrogating how subjectivity is constructed within language, Zolf wrote herself to the point where she can now let her own experience influence but not be the point of her work, in contrast to, for example, the confessional lyric. She has stated that in her earlier collections when she was dealing with herself, “it’s been easy for me to pass, as a straight, a non-Jew.” Interestingly enough, when she presented herself openly in Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks, 1999), her worries proved to be, perhaps, more of her own creation. “My family didn’t have much of a notable reaction to the book,” she says.

Finding the freedom to no longer have the Rachel Zolf-self as the focus of her work has allowed her a greater sense of play within her poems, but not without a certain sense of responsibility. “I’m not playing with language for the sake of wank,” she says. Indeed, she is not, as Human Resources comes directly out of her experience writing marketing and employee copy part-time. Recognizing that as a poet “we all make deals to survive”—though I’m certain that extends beyond just the poet—she is mining the language of capitalism’s excess, employing the creative potential of salvaging. Using the language of her day job, internet search engines and poetic history (in the excerpts I’ve read Pound, Williams and Bataille all make appearances) she creates a poetry that allows the reader to enter from numerous points, creating an open text that does not tell the reader what to think, but rather presents an aestheticized version of many office workers’ daily lives. The main difference is that Zolf, unlike, say, The Office, has gone out of her way to point out that the language of our daily existence is deadening, controlling and numbing—not something to simply accept and laugh at during prime-time. Her ability to transform this language into a work of beauty and exceptional power demonstrates that Zolf has indeed reached the point where she can focus on interrogating the world around, and not strictly the world within, her.

Also reading with Rachel Zolf is Sharon Harris, whose newest book is AVATAR, put out by the Mercury Press. Harris has been involved in documenting the Toronto poetry scene for more than 10 years and has an ongoing project photographing the words “I love you” wherever they appear throughout Toronto. Her work plays with how language is presented on the page in the tradition of concrete poetry (one version of “I love you” was produced by Harris in Braille) and also has an interest in ’pataphysics, the imaginary science founded by Alfred Jarry.

Tom Mandel will also read with these poets. Mandel has been associated intimately with the language poetry movement, containing such famous American poets as Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman and Lynn Hyjinian. Currently Mandel is contributing to the language poets’ collective experiment in autobiography, The Grand Piano, the second volume of which has just been released.

With these three poets, expect nothing in terms of traditional lyric form, but perhaps in content. None of these poets take language at face value and all three continue to investigate how language is either manipulated ideologically or typographically, and the impact that has on our perception of the world.

Rachel Zolf, Sharon Harris and Tom Mandel read at Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street, on Thursday, April 19 at 7pm, as part of the Just Buffalo Small Press Series.