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.
On July 12, 2022 at 8:00 p.m. (EDT), as part of the Significant Others Reading Series—a “series dedicated to new books and the shadow texts that inspired them”—I’ll be giving an online reading of some of my sestinas from the latest issue of Always Crashing along with some of the poems in their background radiation. Mary Biddinger and Day Heisinger-Nixon will also be reading. Get the link to the reading here and order the issue here.
I had the privilege of meeting Richard Siken when I was quite young–an undergraduate at the University of Arizona–and he gave me lots of good advice on the poetry world (and life), conversations I still cherish. Please help him out.
Stroke Recovery Fund for Poet Richard Siken.
Nuclear and Environmental
Alenka Zupančič, “The Apocalypse Is (Still) Disappointing.”
James Livingston, “Time, Dread, Apocalypse Now.
Ted Nordhaus, “The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse.”
Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin, eds., Apocalypse, special issue of ASAP/Journal.
Frame, Apocalypse.
Brad Plumer, “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace.”
Damian Carrington, “Why The Guardian Is Changing the Language It Uses about the Environment.”
Nuclear and Environmental
Fourth National Climate Assessment.
Deconstructed, “Will the US Ever Give Up Its Nukes?”
“Trump Says US Will Withdraw from Nuclear Deal with Russia.”
Wilfred Wan, “The Nuclear Threat Is Rising: Europe Cannot Just Stand and Watch.”
Will Steffen, et al, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.”
Kate Aronoff, “‘Hothouse Earth’ Co-Author: The Problem Is Neoliberal Economics” and “With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation.”
Kim Stanley Robinson, “To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need to Take On Capitalism.”
On September 18, 2018, I read some poems with Julie Suarez-Hayes at SUNY Oneonta in Oneonta, NY for the Red Dragon Reading Series. I read “Volcanoes/Organics” and “Nothingness Introduced into the Heart of the Image,” from The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015), and “Fallout: New Vegas” and “An Open Letter to Narcissus: The Magazine by Narcissists, for Narcissists,” from The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017). I concluded with a couple poems from a new project, which I have omitted from the recording. Roger W. Hecht provided a wonderful introduction. Thanks to Ruth Carr for the recording, and to George Hovis and Bob Bensen for inviting me to read.
Here is a link to the audio.
And a clip of “Volcanoes/Organics”:
I’ll be giving two readings in Oneonta this fall. The first is later today at the City of the Hills Arts and Music Festival Big Read-In. The event is sponsored by the Community Arts Network of Oneonta, and I’ll be reading at Capresso Coffee Bar and Cuisine on August 4 at 1:00 pm. The event goes from 12:00 – 3:30 pm, with Carol Ohmart Behan, Racheal Fest, April Ford, Betty Fraley, and Andrew Reinbach also reading, followed by an open mic.
I will also be reading as part of SUNY Oneonta’s Red Dragon Reading Series on Tuesday, September 18, 2018 at 7:30 pm in the CME Great Room with Julie Suarez-Hayes.
My essay, “Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents,” has been published in CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary in the the second of two special issues devoted to Ghosh and Miller’s book. The first issue is available here, and the second has an interview with Miller available from behind the paywall. I’ve included an abstract of my essay below, along with a table of contents.
Abstract: This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke UP, 2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and Miller’s differing methods for approaching literary study in the twenty-first century: undiscriminating catholicity and rhetorical reading, respectively. Through emblematic readings of David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011), the videogame Katamari Damacy (2004), and Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now (2016), this essay argues that Thinking Literature across Continents self-reflexively models and performs the interested, situated reading practices necessary for continuing the never-ending project of encountering, sharing, accounting for, learning from, and contending with others and their divergent readings, practices that, though many may have lost sight of them today, are fundamental to the project of democracy itself.
“Thinking Literature Across . . . II,” special issue, CounterText, table of contents:
Ivan Callus and James Corby, “Editorial.”
J. Hillis Miller, Ivan Callus, and James Corby, “The CounterText Interview: J. Hillis Miller.”
Bradley J. Fest, “Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents.”
Simona Sawhney, “Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature.”
Jakob Lothe, “The Author’s Ethical Responsibility and the Ethics of Reading.”
Jonathan Locke Hart, “Ideas of Poetics and the Close Reading of Poetry.”
Shaobo Xie, “Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside.”
Kirk Kenny and James Corby, “Screens of Fortune: A Photo-Essay.”
Timothy Mathews, “The Many Hands of Thick Time: William Kentridge at the Whitechapel Gallery.”
I have written an essay, “Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents,” which will appear in the spring issue of CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary, the second of two special issues devoted to Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke UP, 2016). I’ll provide more information about this essay at a later date.
In the meantime, the first issue of CounterText addressing Ghosh and Miller‘s book (vol. 3, no. 3) is now available. Additionally, a conversation between Marjorie Perloff, Charles Bernstein, and the two authors opening the special issue is available from behind the journal’s paywall.
“Thinking Literature Across . . .,” special issue, CounterText, table of contents:
Marjorie Perloff, J. Hillis Miller, Charles Bernstein. and Ranjan Ghosh, “The CounterText Conversation: Thinking Literature. . . .”
Maria Margaroni, “Dialogics, Diacritics, Diasporics: Ranjan Ghosh, J. Hillis Miller, and the Becoming-Now of Theory.”
Georges Van Den Abbeele, “Literary Intransigence: Between J. Hillis Miller and Ranjan Ghosh.”
Claire Colebrook, “Crossing Continents.”
Steven Yao, “How Many Ways of Thinking Literature across Continents?”
Pramod K. Nayar, “Literature/Ethics/Reading.”
Susana Onega, “Thinking English Literature and Criticism under the Transmodern Paradigm.”
Lene M. Johannessen, “Poetics of Peril.”
Adrian Grima and Ivan Callus, “Irreverent and Inventive Mamo.”
Juann Mamo, “Nanna Venut’s Children in America: Two Chapters from the First English Translation,” trans. Albert Gatt.
Ivan Callus, “Literature, Journalism, and the Countertextual: Daphne Caruana Galizia, 1964–2017.”
Mario Aquilina, review of Essayism and the Return of the Essay, by Brian Dillon.
To welcome me as a new faculty member in the Department of English at Hartwick College, I have been invited to give a reading from my new book, The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), on Thursday, November 16 at 7:00 pm as part of the Visiting Writers Series. The reading will take place in the Eaton Lounge of Bresee Hall, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY. One of my students at Hartwick, Chelsea Jacobson, will be reading some poems as well.
It’s been a long year, long for many reasons, but here’s a backlog of some links. (Some very good news is imminent. . . .)
Nuclear and Environmental
New York Times Editorial Board, “The Finger on the Nuclear Button.”
Rebecca Savranksy, “US May Launch Strike if North Korea Moves to Test Nuclear Weapon.”
Kaveh Waddell, “What Happens if a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Manhattan.”
Radiolab, “Nukes.”
Laurel Wamsley, “Digitization Unearths New Data From Cold War-Era Nuclear Test Films.”
Michael Biesecker and John Flesher, “President Trump Institutes Media Blackout at EPA.”
Brian Kahn, “The EPA Has Started to Remove Obama-Era Information.”
Zoë Schlanger, “Hackers Downloaded US Government Climate Data and Stored It on European Servers as Trump Was Being Inaugurated.”
Cass R. Sunstein, “Making Sense of Trump’s Order on Climate Change.”
Laurie Penny, “The Slow Confiscation of Everything.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 