A sonnet from an ongoing sequence just appeared in issue 5 of Small Po(r)tions magazine. Check out “2015.02.” More poems from this project are on their way in a couple weeks.
Poetry
Beginning of the Semester Links
Now that the semester is starting, I will have less time to read things on the internet. So here’s one last link dump for the summer.
Nuclear and Environment
Maria Temming, “Geoengineering Won’t Save Us: Why It Can’t Halt the Effects of Climage Change by Itself.”
Claire L. Evans, “Climate Change Is so Dire We Need a New Kind of Science Fiction to Change It.”
Alan Taylor, “A World without People.”
Bill McKibben, “The Pope and the Planet.”
Mark Soderstrom, “Unequal Universes.”
And Kenneth Chang, “World Will not End Next Month, NASA Says.”
Brandon Shimoda, ed., The Volta, no. 56, and April Naoko Heck, “Dispatch from Hiroshima.”
Sam Stein, “July Was The Hottest Month Ever; Cable News Barely Noticed.”
August 2015 Links
Nuclear and Environment
Margaret Atwood, “It’s Not Climate Change–It’s Everything Change.”
Eric Schlosser, “Why Hiroshima Matters Now More than Ever.”
Ian Buruma, review of Nagasaki: Life after Nuclear War, by Susan Southard.
James Barron, “A Manhattan Project Veteran Had a Unique View of Atomic Bomb Work.”
Lydia Millet, “Save the Elephant.”
Heather Murphy, “Comparing Two ‘Blue Marble’ Photos of Earth.”
The Rocking Chair Available for Pre-Order
I am very happy to announce that my first volume of poetry, The Rocking Chair, can now be pre-ordered from Blue Sketch Press. (It is also available on Amazon.)
Three New Poems: “The Shape of Things I,” “Winter, or, Some (Future) Ambiguities,” and “We’re Just Like Yesterday’s Headlines”
I am happy to report that three new poems, “The Shape of Things I,” “Winter, or, Some (Future) Ambiguities,” and “We’re Just Like Yesterday’s Headlines,” were just published in the third issue of PLINTH.
Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) and Other Links
I am sad to say that Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014), one of my most important teachers, has passed away. I have written a short remembrance of him that either will appear here or in some other form.
Tomaž Šalamun
Christopher Merrill, “Remembering Tomaž Šalamun.”
Andrew Epstein, “Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) and the New York School.”
Dalkey Archive Press on Šalamun.
And though I can’t read Slovenian, there is much here, including video of a television report.
Some End of 2014 Links
Nuclear
Matthew L.Wald, “Betting on the Need, Scientists Work on Lighter, Cleaner Nuclear Energy.”
US National and International
Patrick L. Smith, “We Are Fucking Sadists: We Are Not Decent, and We Are Not a Democracy.”
Moisés Naím, “The Cuba Deal: Why Now?”
Dan Froomkin, “Billion Dollar Surveillance Blimp to Launch over Maryland.”
End of the Semester Links, Fall 2014
I have been understandably busy with the end of a fun and challenging semester. So there are quite a few links that have built up.
Nuclear and Environment
William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “US Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms.”
Robert Burns, “Air Force: Hagel Departure Won’t Slow Nuke Reforms.”
Mark Memmot, “Nun Who Broke Into Nuclear Complex Gets 35-Month Jail Term.”
Barbara Starr, “Navy Investigation Under Way after Female Officers Filmed.”
Eric Holthaus, “Seventy–Seven Zero–Inches of Snow for Buffalo as Winter Overpowers America.”
The Rocking Chair
I am happy to announce that my first volume of poetry, The Rocking Chair, is forthcoming from Blue Sketch Press in 2015. I have worked on this book for many years and am delighted that it is finally seeing the light of day. Here is a description. More info to come.
The Rocking Chair by Bradley J. Fest
Bradley J. Fest’s debut work, The Rocking Chair, is a long poem that emerges from the detritus of contemporaneity, absorbing and accumulating whatever it can from the networked chaos of the overmediated present. Assembled from science fiction and the western, critical theory and hardcore, videogames and phenomenology, footnotes and simulation, diabolism and hyperarchivalism (etc.), this work yawps through diverse material and discursive registers. Working from the footnote and endnote as primary formal constraints, Fest invents a poetry in conversation with the Man with No Name as much as John Ashbery, Alain Badiou, Stephen Hawking, or The Blood Brothers. The poems abuse textuality through misplaced rigor and confused genre archetypalism, across sections and subsections of lyric reflection and play, in order to discover vibrant and vital materialitites. As humorous as it is deeply serious—declaring the task of “making anxiety fun”—The Rocking Chair enacts a radical poetics of assemblage and emergence, seeking to articulate some way of being and an imaginary commensurate with life in the twenty-first century.
Many September Links
As predicted, I have been quite busy indeed and have not had a chance to post anything over the past couple of weeks. A bunch of fascinating stuff has been happening, a bunch of interesting books are coming out, etc., so I’m sad that I’ve been remiss in my duties. Hopefully this large batch of links will make up for that.
Apocalypse and After
George Dvorsky, “Have Humans Already Conquered the Threat of Extinction?”
Or not. Graham Turner and Cathy Alexander, “Limits to Growth Was Right: New Research Shows We’re Nearing Collapse.”
Jessica Corbett and Ethan Corey, “5 Crucial Lessons for the Left from Naomi Klein’s New Book.”
Eric Holthaus, “New Study Links Polar Vortex to Climate Change.”
And who knows where to put this one: Alison Flood, “Margaret Atwood’s New Work Will Remain Unseen for a Century.”
