BRADLEY J. FEST / 6 SONNETS
2020.01
“Love in the time of coronavirus was distant and domestic”and during the first week of quarantine every poet wrote
some version of this line while sequestered in an attic
or basement or shower stall raging against the Learists
but performing their feed. And then they had to z00m and
hangout and houseparty and design syllabi devoted to
purple books with their team-teaching collaborators1
and email, email, email2 and, for a time, wrote no more lines.
Conditions were clear for some3; for others: the supermarket
was proximity and oblivion; arms astroturfed “for the economy”
argued for mass suffering with free consumption4; our veins:
homes for ultraviolet, Clorox®, Lysol®, and hydroxychloroquine.5
Two months later: circling the neighborhood again, annual
rhythms, closed playgrounds, snow in May, the deaths.6
2020.02
Work in the time of coronavirus was alienation, isolation,and solidarity—it was also disappearing7—and the year’s delayed
spring meant the hyacinths, dandelions, and cherry blossoms
flowered once and then frigidly again, sprouting frost and snow.
April’s word was immiseration. May, brought to its viewers
by a number beyond any explanatory accounting, presaged all
the rest. The heroes of social distancing held indoor confabs over
cheap beer.8 Projections were bleak. Then May, June, and July were
for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks . . .
for Black lives, for the streets,9 leveling monuments,10 defunding, justice.
And everything in the US was under the pall of November 3: air conditioning, spikes,
deaths, nongovernance, and the feds, the feds, the vipers,11 the brutality.12
Seven months in twenty-six lines.13 Some tweeted, others journaled,
yet others complained about whatever—everyone tried to endure
(history).
You can read more about it somewhere else.14
2020.03
Time in the time of coronavirus was time,15simultaneous, oppressive, ongoing, nowhere—
pure virtual potentiality in the realness of reality’s
material ugh: “American Americium,”16 if you will;
doomscrolling in the congealed exhaustion of a
moment17;
quite boring (intentional perturbations ≠ variety18);
projects and deadlines nevertheless—work, work.
A day could swell with its own repetition and be
empty, accumulating inexistence (in the details)
as if reinforcing minor forgotten decisions that later
overwhelm by negation/accumulation before wisping
away. The fall’s approach belied such stasis though:
an intensification beyond what everyone agreed
should have been the end.
2020.04
The serial poems, the book length works show a desire or drive to be endlessly making something “all about everything,” inside poesis itself.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis
of another negatively appearing by sheer inertial duration,
an anti-thread,19 and two years (and [only] seven poems . . .)
in, a disjunctive narrative about History, a now too familiar
catastrophism threatens to cumber the unpatterned flux
of transitory repetition, to turn this into (more of) a record:
testament, document, witness (which it always is). To revise
would embrace meliorism; to leave well enough alone (again/
already) heaps these fragments into the dump that they are:
seen alone; undone when amassed. They are the hour’s wreckage,
though they don’t want to be; they want to anneal and glisk,
become virtual. This poem (and really all the rest) also appear
to be increasingly trying to make sure you understand
that they react and act, observe and assemble: splintering.
(Do you?)
2020.05
And the repetition of yet more defeats all plans.
Shapes, structures, designs, signals20 lurk in these
opuscules while inarticulate contingencies serialize
experience’s daily aperçus into shortwave noiseblasts
contradicting and contracting previous entries and when/
if these/this poems’/poem’s speaker(s) notice(s), reflecting
a vertiginous disponible ars poetica en abyme back at themself,
you, and them—a wonderment multiplying/refracting the lines
and schemes informing their tumult, the disarray gathered
by the arbitrary overarching frameworks—they coalesce
and spread each shuffled yod: germinal text(s) in sequence
disperse/dissolve to bunch consecutively and concurrently
correlated poemfeelings as if formed/as if what is untrue21/as if
a work, but they’re also just a surging irresponsible mass,
abbreviated missives from last days.
2020.06
(So, going forward, this will just have to be the condition
and perhaps needs no more commentary.22 Onward [while
always, of course and unavoidably, looking back23].) Gravity
is a word pulled from the internet and a metaphor and a force
that binds us to our climate emergency.24 It’s also a volta,
as here. In another dispensation, such an other it might
endeavor to bring the unadorned first-person speaker
back from 2019’s oblivion, so: “Construction during
coronavirus meant the sounds of least three new roofs.
In May, my child fell asleep on my shoulder in the heat,
but no longer. Today marks a four-year anniversary.
And I am writing poems, perhaps too quickly,25 knowing
there are other things.” Still a tin artifact, I suppose, but
now with some healthy wens of corrosion adding flavor/
space to its absorptions.
2020.04: Epigraph drawn from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, quoted in Eileen Tabios, review of Days and Works, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Galatea Resurrects 2017 (A Poetry Engagement), July 25, 2017, http://galatearesurrects2017.blogspot.com/2017/07/days-and-works-by-rachel-blau-duplessis.html, emphasis mine.
1. See Bradley J. Fest (@BradleyFest), “Toddler: ‘I teach.’ / Me: ‘What do you teach?’ / T: ‘Books.’ / Me: ‘What books?’ / T: ‘Purple ones.’ // When pressed further, she presented the following: // Purple Books: A Syllabus. // 1/,” Twitter, April 18, 2020, https://twitter.com/BradleyFest/status/1251564634882146304.↩
2. “I’m lonely in the world / and I can send email, email / email” (Eileen Myles, “Bone,” in I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems 1975–2014 [New York: Ecco, 2015], 259).↩
3. See, for example, Anna Kornbluh, “Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 12, 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Academe-s-Coronavirus-Shock/248238; and Marie Solis, “Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for ‘Disaster Capitalism,’” Vice, March 13, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dmqyk/naomi-klein-interview-on-coronavirus-and-disaster-capitalism-shock-doctrine/.↩
4. Lois Beckett, “Armed Protesters Demonstrate against Covid-19 Lockdown at Michigan Capitol,” Guardian, April 30, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-protests-coronavirus-lockdown-armed-capitol.↩
5. “‘So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,’ the president said, turning to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, ‘and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting,’ the president continued. ‘And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it’d be interesting to check that.’ Pointing to his head, Mr. Trump went on: ‘I’m not a doctor. But I’m, like, a person that has a good you-know-what’” (“Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump Suggests Injecting Disinfectant as Treatment,” BBC News, April 24, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177). Also see Paul Waldman, “The Real Reason Trump Is Obsessed with Hydroxychloroquine,” Washington Post, April 7, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/07/real-reason-trump-is-obsessed-with-hydroxychloroquine/.↩
6. 282,636 globally as of today. See The New York Times, “Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak,” New York Times, May 11, 2020, 8:10 a.m. (EDT), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html.↩
7. See Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations,” New Yorker, May 1, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-coronavirus-and-our-future; and “The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee,” Bloomberg Green, June 5, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-05/the-climate-case-for-a-jobs-guarantee-kim-stanley-robinson.↩
8. And we judged, participated, understood, kept away, envied, yelled or were yelled at—it was really up to the individual. . . .↩
9. Even Cooperstown, Delhi, and Oneonta, New York.↩
10. Not a metaphor.↩
11. See Vijay Prashad (@vijayprashad), “United States of Fascism,” Twitter, July 23, 2020, https://twitter.com/vijayprashad/status/1286485751887265792?s=03.↩
12. Michelle Goldberg, “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun,” New York Times, July 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/opinion/portland-protests-trump.html.↩
13. Today’s numbers: Global cases and deaths: more than 16.2 million and 648,465; US: 4.2 million and 146,754; Otsego County, New York: 103 and 6. See The New York Times, “Coronavirus Map,” July 27, 2020, 9:00 a.m. (EDT); The New York Times, “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count,” New York Times, July 27, 2020, 9:00 a.m. (EDT), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html; and New York State Department of Health, “Persons Tested Positive by County” and “Fatalities,” NYSDOH COVID-19 Tracker, July 27, 2020, 9:54 a.m. (EDT), https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Tracker/NYSDOHCOVID-19Tracker-Map and https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Tracker/NYSDOHCOVID-19Tracker-Fatalities.↩
14. See Bradley J. Fest, “Spring 2020 Links (Pre-COVID-19),” The Hyperarchival Parallax, May 23, 2020, https://bradleyjfest.com/2020/05/23/spring-2020-links-pre-covid-19/; “Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 1: March 11–April 15, 2020,” The Hyperarchival Parallax, June 16, 2020, https://bradleyjfest.com/2020/06/16/links-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-vol-1-march-11-april-15-2020/; “Vol. 2: April 15–May 15, 2020,” July 1, 2020, https://bradleyjfest.com/2020/07/01/links-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-vol-2-april-15-may-15-2020/; “Vol. 3: May 16–June 15, 2020,” July 23, 2020, https://bradleyjfest.com/2020/07/23/links-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-vol-3-may-16-june-15-2020/; and “Vol. 4: June 16–July 15, 2020,” July 29, 2020, https://bradleyjfest.com/2020/07/29/links-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-vol-4-june-16-july-15-2020/.↩
15. See SoulSearchAndDestroy, Time (Chillwave - Lofi - Electronic Mix), YouTube, July 11, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdYzL6wkr0A.↩
16. “Oh comrades of memory, at last our homework is done!” Bernadette Mayer, “Sonnet” and “The Numerous 25-Year-Old 85-Year-Olds of 1985,” in Sonnets (1989), 25th Anniversary Ed. (New York: Tender Buttons, 2014), 34, 39.↩
17. Brian X. Chen, “You’re Doomscrolling Again. Here’s How to Snap Out of It,” New York Times, July 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/technology/personaltech/youre-doomscrolling-again-heres-how-to-snap-out-of-it.html.↩
18. E.g., nights of TV and ice cream.↩
19. See (already) Bradley J. Fest, “2018.01,” MS.↩
20. See SoulSearchAndDestroy, Signals (Synthwave - Retrowave - Chillwave Mix), YouTube, August 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qw-CHmgHf0 and how it muffles certain tantrums.↩
21. “The whole is the false” (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life [1951], trans. E. F. N. Jephcott [1974; repr., New York: Verso, 1978], p. 50, sec. 29).↩
22. Or just a little more: that is, if a continuation, this and all the rest are also breaks: the status of each entry, each iteration, becomes sequence without sequence. So, on toward . . . what (if the present [raging plague (August 6, 2020)] and the other present [metapoetics] are already [exhausted?])? It is as if each sonnet has to rediscover its fundamental contradictory condition each time they write themselves into the conflict of the space between now and all the rest.↩
23. “Looking back . . . everything’s blackened and burned” (Under a Dying Sun, These Stitches [Saratoga, CA: Unfun Records, 2000], EP)!↩
24. Ibid. See also Astral Throb, GRAVITY - A Synthwave Retrowave Special Compilation, YouTube, July 28, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8gHFd1Slfo.↩
25. After months of not having time to write anything—so not quickly at all. A year passes in the space of pages.↩
Bradley J. Fest is assistant professor of English at Hartwick College. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015) and The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), and his poems have appeared in over thirty journals and anthologies, including recent work in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Masque & Spectacle, Pamenar, The Second Chance Anthology (Variant Literature, 2020), Verse, and elsewhere. He has also written a number of essays on contemporary literature and culture, which have been published in boundary 2, CounterText, Critique, Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), The Silence of Fallout (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), and elsewhere. More information is available at bradleyjfest.com.