2022.07
Such an iterative impasto as this
recording
mania,
such a save us1: this freedom
of sky reaching into our nothing-change2 sauntering the night
because an ai wrote the last three poems;
it’s unfortunate that mischief eyes couldn’t do
otherwise;
just no correlation,3
especially if we refuse to be anonymous
online. Let’s return for a week to the Deleuzian fields,
remember some epic completionist’s compulsion of synth-
looped unfated Stradivarius trembling before the forces that slip
our defeated piles of bone4 just lecturing in the easy collegiate
afternoon beckoning too the final falling disappearance of
our worst regret.
2022.08–09
Back in the city’s redundant nostalgias, the quiet
saxophones of (a)neurotypicality ding the night
crush tomorrowness of catastrophe, crinkly
paper at the bottom of the album pile: the new
record is just seriously bad, epigraph
payments be damned: an impermanence, this ballasted
seam of not a thing, a closure at breath’s end,
the warmest year of our possible births amidst
centuries of fire, atrocities of referenced
reference in the demon clades of grad school’s
coldest halls; it was yet another night Converge
would shake us into piles of gold.5 The world-
historical ruin-forces of desperate
crescendos
sweet-void the portraits of the past we desire to paint
when we target the yesterday that was a target of its
own previous attempt to disassociate from itself
else the addicted alternative we could have pursued
if we’d chosen to would be the work we never stopped
doing in the 2020s, really. See, the institutions were
gone. They had
just crumbled by ’29. Even peripherally, no
longer could The Weekend process our papers;
Armageddon’s Lottery6 was just more meanest
love and, really, just another word for “the glass
eye of the law.”7 We didn’t have anything left on
that day, in that year, at that moment when ongoingness
could leave and wash and take
the long walk home.
2022.10
I never want to be old somewhere listening
to bluegrass. But yinz know that [end confession].
In the meantime: a poem amidst and remembering
addressing the editors of journals in the first part
of an arty pop video before the banger song starts8
like it was always 2023 realizing it could never
marry the midnight anthems someone actually
wrote down as we sang them incautiously driving
down the road shooting from the foothills of
the Catalinas toward a damn mountain town
in the Catskills and full adulthood, all those
letters on countless pages, the recommendations
only now exceeding what we requested, that damnable
pairing we grasp exhaustedly, once, once again.
2023.17–18
in art, we do not run
to keep up with random
moments, we select
& create
the moment
occurring forever:
timelessness held
at the peak of time:
—A. R. Ammons,
Tape for the Turn
of the Year
It’s been unfortunate
how such moments
keep getting
put next to one another,9
though.10 They have their
soundtrack,11 their
epiphanies, the cold dead
hand of their past, the
losses. Sure.
But
today is fundamentally
not
yesterday nor tomorrow.
That’s the rub. It just
keeps on being today
and that’s all there is
to write about time and
again in this achy old
“sonnet” buggy: some
desperate and disparate
presentism we occasion-
ally mistake for politics
or ontology or else just
baseless12 accumulation,13
really. Shame can also
be different today than
yesterday, huh? No matter.
Some forms can’t abide.
2023.19
Hence we turn and turn about thinking back to
those evenings’ closing altricial frequencies, more
often than not exiling ambivalent avenue-potentials
of sweet delight and the postinformatic jock jams
we’d alternatively smoulder into in the wake of
inaccessible hyperdiamond clades if we could,
what we’d otherwise have, if we would: a quick
monopolization of that new modesty and waning
bourgeisification rising over the neo–East of Western
front, if we should.14 On the way home: become mycelial
nihilism. In the club: wane the affect of the new HBO
Show.15 In the poem: struff for the reader’s Omega Mart
sensibilities, preforming neofeudalist clinamen petrifying
individualism out past history’s lurching asinine breakers.
These poems are some of the most recent iterations of an ongoing experimental American sonnet sequence—with nearly one-hundred poems published over the past decade—concerned with how the distributed networks of the twenty-first century construct and filter time. Composed consecutively as a kind of occasional temporal snapshot, the poems in Volume I document certain experiences of what it is like to live precariously in the overdeveloped world between 2013 and 2017; Volume II chronicles the pandemic years of 2018–24; and the third volume begins during the summer of 2024. Portions of this ongoing sonnet project have appeared in nearly forty journals, including Always Crashing, Apocalypse Confidential, Masque & Spectacle, Pamenar, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere.
Numbers are to the poet's bibliography index which formatting prevents me from including.....Strider
Bradley J. Fest is associate professor and Cora A. Babcock Chair in English at Hartwick College. He is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015), The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), and 2013–2017: Sonnets (LJMcD Communications, 2024), along with a number of essays on contemporary literature and culture, which have been published in boundary 2, CounterText, Critique, Genre, Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and elsewhere. More information is available at bradleyjfest.com.
Jazz poetry welcome. 🙏
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