Hartwick College’s Faculty Lecture Series, Fall 2023

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This fall, the Faculty Development Committee and the Office of Academic Affairs at Hartwick College will present three speakers in the annual Faculty Lecture Series.

All talks take place at during the common hour: 12:20–1:20 p.m. in Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall at Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York.

Admission to the readings is free and the events are open to the public.

Tessa Yang, “Two Truths and a Lie: Research in Fiction,” Friday, September 8, 2023.

Mark Kuhlmann, “The Uncommon Octopus: The Ecology of Octopus insularis at San Salvador Island, The Bahamas,” Friday, October 13, 2023.

Michael Branch, “Tuning In: Policing Rural Upstate New York through Police Radio Scanners,” Friday, November 10, 2023.

For more information, visit the Faculty Lecture Series webpage.

“Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis” in boundary 2

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boundary 2, vol 50, no 2, cover image I am honored to say that my interview with the great poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” has just been published in the most recent issue of boundary 2. (This link should provide access for three months.) I am deeply grateful to DuPlessis for corresponding with me during the summer of 2020. In lockdown with no childcare, corresponding with DuPlessis via email to conduct this interview (when I had a spare moment or two to do so) played a large part in keeping me sane during that difficult time. A huge thanks also to Racheal and Aviva, who were right there every day along with me while this interview was being conducted.

Here’s an abstract of the interview:

This interview with poet, essayist, literary critic, and collagist Rachel Blau DuPlessis was conducted via email correspondence between June 11 and August 29, 2020. Author of over a dozen volumes of poetry and half a dozen books in modernist studies, poetics, and feminist criticism, DuPlessis reflects broadly on her career in this interview. She discusses the ongoing role of feminism in her writing and thought, the forms of the fold and the fragment, the relationship between her poetry and criticism, her work in and on the long poem, and her post‐Drafts poetry, including her (at the time) most recent book, Late Work (2020). The interview concludes with a conversation about the relationship between poetry and theorizing practices and a meditation on writing during a global pandemic.

For my writing on DuPlessis: “‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”

And for previous interviews: “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller” and “An Interview with Jonathan Arac.”

Spring 2023 Links

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Nuclear and Environmental

Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (1960).

Raymond Zhnog, “For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age.”

Nicholas Kristof, “Cheer Up! The World Is Better Off Than You Think.”

Rebecca Solnit, “What If Climate Change Meant Not Doom–But Abundance?”

Elizabeth Kolbert, “It’s Earth Day—and the News Isn’t Good.”

David Wallace-Wells, “Greta Thunberg: ‘The World Is Getting More Grim by the Day.'”

Mark O’Connell, “Our Way of Life Is Poisoning Us.”

Simon Schama, “Simon Schama on the Broken Relationship between Humans and Nature: ‘The Joke’s on Us. Things Are Amiss.'”

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2013–2017: Sonnets Will Be Published by LJMcD Communications in July 2024

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Fest, Bradley J--Cover for 2013-2017--600 resolution--coverI am absolutely thrilled to announce that 2013–2017: Sonnets, the first volume of my ongoing sonnet sequence, will be published by LJMcD Communications in July 2024. I’ll update this page with more information when I have it, but for now, here’s a description of the book:

2013–2017: Sonnets is the first volume in Bradley J. Fest’s ongoing sequence of American sonnets, a project concerned with how the distributed networks of the twenty-first century construct and filter time. Continuing the program of poetic assemblage explored in his first two books, these poems were composed consecutively as emergent temporal snapshots documenting certain experiences of what it was like to live precariously in the overdeveloped world between 2013 and 2017. Over the past decade, this ongoing experimental sonnet sequence has become: a complex encounter with time and its twenty-first-century rhythms; a document of artistic maturation; a personal archive of occasions, moments, days; a continually refreshed confrontation with the global computational hyperarchive; a discography of popular music; an extended reflection on contemporary literature, art, and culture; an increasingly multiplex meditation on the sonnet; an historical record of the troubling national situation in the United States; and a work of mourning for a world disappearing into climate emergency. The second volume, currently in progress, begins in 2018.

Also, thanks much to my very good friend Taylor Baldwin for the amazing cover image: The Interpreter (2010).

“Archives of Spring” in The Decadent Review

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The final poem in my “Archives” series, “Archives of Spring,” is out in The Decadent Review. The whole series can be accessed here. Enormous thanks to Dimitri Kaufman, editor of The Decadent Review, for presenting these poems in such a wonderful fashion over the past year. And if you want links to each individual other poem, here they are: “Archives of Summer,” “Archives of Autumn,” and “Archives of Winter.”

Reading at Bushel

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At 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 26, 2023, I’ll be reading poems—including some new ones (never before heard!)—at the Bushel Collective as part of a release event for the State University of New York at Delhi’s literary journal, Agate Literary and Arts Magazine. Bushel is located at 106 Main Street in Delhi, New York.

Update

Here’s a picture of my reading at Bushel. Thanks to Peter W. Brusoe for the pic.

Fest, Bradley J--Picture of Reading at Bushel, April 26, 2023

“Cute Noise Indeed” in Who Dis?

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A short poem assembled from language from a few of my tweets (below), “Cute Noise Indeed,” has been published in Who Dis?, “a journal of fake poems for the misinformation age.” The journal has “NO MASTHEAD NO CONTACT NO TRUTH / NO GODS NO IDOLS NO MATTER,” and “all appearances are by determinative actions employing chance.” As such, I did not compose this poem nor am I responsible for its publication, despite being listed as its author. The original tweets it was assembled from:

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“2021.05,” “2022.03,” and “2022.04” in The Kitchen Sink

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As I mentioned in my last post, my work appeared in two different publications today. The second: More sonnets from my ongoing sequence, “2021.05,” “2022.03,” and “2022.04,” are in The Kitchen Sink, a brand-new publication based in Oneonta, New York (where I currently reside) run by recent graduates of the State University of New York at Oneonta. Thanks to Alexis Ochi and the other editors for accepting my work. I’m also thrilled to have these poems published alongside work from one of my students at Hartwick College.

“2021.06,” “2022.01,” and “2022.05” in IceFloe Press

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My work appeared in two different publications today. First, I’m thrilled to have more recent sonnets from my ongoing series, “2021.06,” “2022.01,” and “2022.05,” as part of a series of pandemic “Dispatches” at IceFloe Press. Thanks especially to Robert Frede Kenter for championing these poems and for the amazing visual poem collage he made to accompany my work.