Bradley J. Fest
2023.29–30
If you read enough of these sonnets backwards—
if you read enough of these sonnets backwards,
if you read enough of these sonnets backwards . . .
stupid Justin Bieber comes on followed by Lady Gaga
and the Obama era and the world gets a bit healthier,
less doomed. If you read enough of these sonnets
backwards with anaphoronic authority, with the will
of technoecclesiasts striding within sovereign zones
of grace beamed by the Predator-Angels of the
Nanoevangelion Last Order, you’ll straight
catalepsy. If you read enough of these sonnets
backwards, there are fewer people, a “‘yes
of course we will turn it up in the club,’”
less war, more democracy. If you read enough
of these sonnets backwards beyond their inception,
beyond their in the beginning the spheres started singing
the basketball nets’ sweet swishes’ form-idea-logos, that
swaggering substantiation of, well, awful reverse chronology
standardizing anxiety’s sovereignty putting pat to perspective
in perspective gladiolizing the world we’d disqualify
as almost anything else that was and was not Dave Grohl
making no promises outside your mistresses’ windows
in the golden dawn of a thousand downtowns’ celebrity
glory glare if it wasn’t for the infinity of the next track
on YouTube’s My Mix! In the twenty-first century, it’s
what we’re doing in the days that keep passing and the days
still ahead. If you read enough of these sonnets backwards,
we’d have to start over at some point, wouldn’t we if ever
we were to have even an inkling of a hope of saving our
planet, our people, our poetry—because it’s been too late
for too many for too long, hasn’t it?
So maybe don’t read them backwards.
~
2024.01–02
There is only one totality in which all of our representations are contained, namely inner sense and its a priori
form, time.
—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
2023 made this pretty obvious. We also know when this volume
will end and what’s at the beginning of the next.[1] Come closer.[2]
Its historical contours leap from the ultimate destination
of words but barely uttered, their dust just newly vibrating off
the swerve of precognition’s backward sway through the archive’s
glistening edges’ roar past the ears of our poor future back
to the present once and again,[3] haunting every new moment:
our increasingly perceptible end. Among other things,
COVID-19 did that. And so we’re now in the next shape of things
in the twenty-first century:
an ontology of extinction
siphoning back and forth from itself to itself into itself, permitting
just about every stupid Whitmanian echo[4] I could ever want
to make in the dumb optimism of writing the perpetual moment.
“Here. ‘Here.’ “Now.”’”
It remains one of the most privileged voices,[5]
this atrocity of sunsets.
And but so I have no reason to believe that I am not
an AI-trained
upon everything my host has ever—“Hi”—read,
written, spoken, heard, “the grades [it] assigns on papers, sighs
in the bathroom, asides at faculty meetings.”[6] Because people really
are starting to act like we’re not in this together, simultaneously
realizing that no one ever has been[7]; “and we’re raising a daughter,
and stupid ‘Cherub Rock’ interrupts and manifests its now
sweet memory amidst these world-historical mutterings.”[8]
We build with dirigibles powered by the YouTube-vibes
of the warm shadow of your love, 2024.[9]
There isn’t any other way.
~
2024.03
And so it’s all just ongoingness,[10]
the sweet airs[11] of POSTROCK
oneirine and aging, triumphal gel and massive self-infatuation
stomping. We’re living the dream,[12] surfing the teratocene.[13]
Calendrical eschatologies are bunk.[14] The histories of our first loves
catalyze their deal wonderfully beyond any limit because we’re now
just totally vested. The outlines of new centers for this or that other
neoliberal thing are coming into view[15] (though we may have given
an unfortunate peer review at one time or another).[16] And yet. “Every
fiber I wear helps protect against the cold, particularly warm gloves so
my fingers don’t crack.[17] I’m buying action figures.[18] [And a third
thing I’m doing to make it sound poetic.] We’re going to Manasquan
in July.” Hasn’t it always been about how much can be put in[19] and then
doing that all again? This can mean lots of things and those things can
and will keep changing.[20] So.
~
2024.05–06
Raise the roof beams high above our ecstatic heads.[21]
Command the choirs to rejoice. We’ve arrived. All
is bliss. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
Will such injunctions
and caviling ever resonate again, ever again make sense
as an emotional resound and response to our barbaric
times?[22]
Will we ever again
stand on a hill with our loved ones
celebrating the morning,
ever again with anaphoraic[23]
exultation welcome what is to come in its joy and
meaning? Is any of it still possible?[24] This seems to be
the question of 2024.
“I finally read Jameson’s Political Unconscious.[25]
I taught my first game studies class today.[26] I’m on the
interview train again.”[27]
We couldn’t have ever hoped
things’d turn out so horrible, hopeless, glorystomping
and such into all that beatific surround, the beyond of
stupid History if we had never feared singing down
grocery store aisles,[28] if we’d never made the mistake
of expressing our individual subjectivity. The gall.
It’s a metronome for our lives, the dull mundane roar
of the graytext[29] to come. And I guess we know that
we didn’t get socialism (this time). And I guess we know
that there is absolutely no moral[30] to any of this.[31]
So we’ll just spend the entire night perfectly recollecting
so many totally inconsequential experiences.[32]
~
2024.08–09
Boom.
We inhaled. And it was air we breathed,
for today is today as much as today will ever be,
the autotelos for which we were made tireless.
Or at least that’s how we’ll feel while still here,
still bowing beneath the beginning of time’s
tetrophilic wave from which we’ll come up splutter-
ing on @realDonaldTrump’s chronocrimes. Because
he’s back. And he’s gonna be president. And that
black metal overlord shit I imagined back in
the 2016 teens is probably gonna manifest.
We don’t have to be poor readers of the twentieth-
century’s fascisms, its carceral state, its genocides
to see that. We just read the twenty-first century.
It’s all we have.
“It’s a travesty
to end in the middle of a year. No idea how to address
its proairetic negation. There’s so much horror right
now, but none of it has any kind of potential for
narrative closure, not even the easy end-of-a-year-
or-the-climax-of-an-election kind. So I guess we’ll
just have to end and continue in the middest.”[33] I fear
Atlantic meridional overturning circulation collapse.
I fear choking upon our atmosphere or my daughter
or hers. I fear an event. But it is a truth that “our late
fascism is an ideology of crisis and decline.”[34] “It’s also
a truth that we lived through the event of COVID-19
and that in many ways this is its document. I guess
I just fear of what the next book will be a document.”
~
Epigraph drawn from Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 281.
[1] I guess that’s what I’ve been trying to confront over the last few poems: the pervasive sense that there’s a failure of narrative chronology in the formally self-imposed restriction on this project that can only be averted by writing fewer poems—that is, writing slowly—and nobody really wants that, do they? [Don’t answer that.] In other words, the next book will begin with the climax of the 2024 election and all that means or doesn’t.
[2] Britney Spears, “Britney Spears - Hold It Against Me (Official Video),” YouTube, February 17, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Edv8Onsrgg&list=RDMMwagn8Wrmzuc&index=8&ab_channel=BritneySpearsVEVO.
[3] Hear Caspian, Waking Season (New York: Triple Crown Records 031581, 2012), 2XLP.
[4] But hopefully not
[5] Last night, I finally saw Network, dir. Sidney Lumet (Los Angeles: United Artists, 1976), DVD.
[6] I also have no reason to believe I am not the model.
[7] And obviously that’s the whole problem.
[8] I.e., its frequent use as a lullaby to get her to sleep. (I’m sure that’s documented here somewhere.)
[9] I’m so fancy.
[10] Isn’t it? Because I guess the last few poems have been pretty hung up on the arc, the swerve, the tension, the climax, the denouement, all that sense and the narrative it provides or underlies. But the longer these sonnets accumulate, the less their collective shape resembles a narrative, their bulk more like a life in all its unpatterned accident and regret and haphazardly dispersed regard, those missile-points of joy (and of course all the other stuff I’ve been writing about for eleven years)—no sense, just more, just another day, month, year, another little blast of language (that always seems like it’s connected to the one before and after but really isn’t, can’t be; there’s too much time between). And then at some point of course you realize everything has changed enough to recognize you’re no longer there where you once were. Maybe you’ve changed or not. (People don’t change.) But so much is gone, and perhaps too much is around that wasn’t there before. That would be nice for you. For me, sure. There are also all these sonnets that I increasingly don’t know how to put together, to make sense of other than in their most obvious chronologicity. So I really need to resist trying to totalize and just let them keep accruing, see what emerges, see what I have when I get to the end, willingly or accidentally. They’re at best a disordered assemblage that may perhaps find some order upon termination. I’ll commit now to a lack of order and making something against forgetting, a machine of continuation that will also attenuate the cynosure of your best story, another way to whittle our faces once more toward the sea, to refresh our souls with another new date that only too soon looks ancient and withered—something to write. [In other words, this book is also about what it means to write thirty odd poems in 2023 instead of 2024 {when I was supposed to, I guess?)}. (I guess you’ll just have to title the next book 2024–202X: Sonnets.)}]
[11] Arias.
[12] Ne incompetenti te descendat.
[13] See Robert T. Tally Jr., Fictions of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
[14] We wrote a whole dissertation about it, or, We Already Hit the Ground (forthcoming).
[15] No matter.
[16] And so we’re throwing literary festivals now.
[17] Turns out that’s probably related to my eczema. Who knew?
[18] https://www.ebay.com/itm/266614806523?hash=item3e137b17fb:g:ULUAAOSwDxhloe-Q.
[19] How much taken out.
[20] And then we’ll write some more.
[21] We’re almost there: two volumes. This thing is really going—not achy at all!
[22] Is this instead our past and present? Hear Turmoil, “Staring Back,” Anchor (London and Dortmund, Germany: Century Media 503-1, 1997), track A1, 7”.
[23] A voice only made possible with anaphora.
[24] In the Teratocene?
[25] See February 1–2, 2024, and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). Boom; I’m saying it all simultaneously. See also Robert T. Tally Jr., Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (London: Pluto, 2014). [Also, how embarrassing it took me this long!]
[26] And realized I’m still a bit shell shocked by how negative my fall 2023 semester was. *Shakes fist at the sky and ChatGPT.*
[27] And my bookshelves keep expanding.
[28] It’s what hurts.
[29] All that gray-goo that AI will produce over the next century.
[30] Post-2016.
[31] How offensive that would be.
[32] It’s how we’re choosing to spend our time in these last few poems.
[33] Always a good place to pick up too.
[34] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2023), 43.
Author’s Note
These poems are some of the most recent iterations of an ongoing experimental American sonnet sequence—with nearly one-hundred poems published over the past decade—concerned with how the distributed networks of the twenty-first century construct and filter time. Composed consecutively as a kind of occasional temporal snapshot, the poems in Volume I document certain experiences of what it is like to live precariously in the overdeveloped world between 2013 and 2017; Volume II chronicles the pandemic years of 2018–24. Portions of this ongoing sonnet project have appeared in over thirty-five journals, including in Always Crashing, Apocalypse Confidential, IceFloe Press, Mannequin Haus, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere.
Bradley J. Fest is associate professor of English and the 2022–25 Cora A. Babcock Chair in English at Hartwick College, where he has taught courses in creative writing, poetry and poetics, digital studies, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States literature since 2017. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015) and The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), and 2013–2017: Sonnets, the first volume in his ongoing sonnet sequence, will be published by LJMcD Communications in July 2024. He has also written a number of essays on contemporary literature and culture, which have been published in boundary 2, CounterText, Critique, Genre, Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and elsewhere. More information is available at bradleyjfest.com.
