The most recent sonnets in my ongoing sequence will appear across two issues of Version (9) Magazine, a journal “fostering . . . space for . . . texts that relate to the world of theory” (they previously published some other poems of mine).[1]“2020.07,” “2020.08,” “2020.09,” “2020.10,” and “2020.11” are in volume 1, issue 2. “2020.12,” “2021.01,” “2021.02,” “2021.03,” and “2021.04” will appear in early 2022 in the magazine’s third issue.
I have a huge amount of gratitude to Always Crashing for nominating my poem, “2020.01,” for Best of the Net 2021. It’s one of my favorite poems from my ongoing sequence: a system-wide volta.
Admission to the readings is free and the events are open to the public. Attendees and all campus visitors must be vaccinated for COVID-19 and will be required to provide either their vaccination card or the New York State Excelsior Pass. Any visitor requiring an exception to this requirement must complete this form and receive prior approval from the College. Masks are required in all College buildings.
Roger W. Hecht will read on Wednesday, October 13, 2021.
The start to this academic year is again unconventional, but feeling much closer to normal, especially owing to Hartwick College’s reopening plans. I’m again teaching two frequently taught creative writing courses and revisiting Poetry and Technology. The syllabi:
I’m delighted to have “c o n t e m p o r a n e i t y,” “Silence,” and “Blason IV,” poems from my current project, Postrock, in the first issue of Version (9) (Summer 2021), a magazine exploring theory in contemporary poetry.
I am particularly proud of this essay, as I wrote it predominantly during the summer of 2020–the height of lockdown–and during which we had no childcare and I couldn’t access the library nor my campus office, including its books. Lots of people to thank, consequently, but particularly Racheal Fest, Courtney Jacobs and James Zeigler for their hard work putting this together during an incredibly difficult year, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Dawn Baker, Hartwick’s interlibrary loan librarian. (There are more acknowledgments on the first page of my essay.) This essay is also the second published chapter from my work in progress, Too Big to Read: The Megatext in the Twenty-First-Century. For other related work on megatexts and hyperarchivalism, see:
In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis’s various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis’s work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext’s phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 