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

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).

Spring 2020 Links (Pre-COVID-19)

A lot of stuff was going on for me this year, both personally and professionally, so I haven’t really had a chance to post links since . . . last summer (!), nine months before the global pandemic was declared. So, to catch up: here’s links from late summer 2019–March 11, 2020 that are, by the very nature of posting them now, rather outdated/anachronistic, a window onto a world that is gone yet still all too present (and excessive), a world that most certainly wasn’t going in the direction of human flourishing and that any nostalgia for may be misplaced. . . . I hope to have “Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 1” up sometime soon(er than nine months from now . . .).

Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say” (February 20, 2020).

 

Nuclear and Environmental

Mary Hudetz, “US Official: Research Finds Uranium in Navajo Women, Babies.”

David E. Sanger and Andrew E. Kramer, “US Officials Suspect New Nuclear Missile in Explosion That Killed Seven Russians.”

Kristin George Bagdanov, “Addressing the Atomic Specter: Ginsberg’S ‘Plutonian Ode’ and America’s Nuclear Unconscious.”

Alyssa Battistoni, “Why Naomi Klein Has Been Right.”

Henry Fountain, “Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change.”

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Some Links on the Current Debate About Contemporary Poetry

The July 2013 issue of Harper’s has an article that has sparked considerable amounts of debate in the world of contemporary poetry. Mark Edmundson’s “Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Verse” is being widely responded to. (There’s a link, but you need a subscription or to pick up an actual copy of the magazine.) A smattering of links:

Ron Charles immediately reported on Edmundson’s polemic in The Washington Post with “Why is Modern Poetry So Bad?” (Though his use of “modern” in the title probably signals a certain ignorance of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry . . . .)

The University of Pittsburgh’s own Dawn Lundy Martin has weighed in with “In Defense of-.”

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