2023.25
In New Jersey17 epistemologizing that your
failures manifest as suboptimal playlists
for the reunion of that millennial band
you were at best ambivalent about during
the first tour, not subjectivitying, evincing
being and becoming in my own ownmost—
definitely cooler-than besting the midnight
chess-match masculinity despair irony on the
metagamificational affect proceduralism, the
waiting, the call, the ride home as someone
you never meant to be and chose gladly
the Apollonian alternative to, the picture-book
nymph-prince prancing and denuding the void
structuring every work of art behind reality.
___________________________
17 One can at times evince their name: see Bradley J. Fest (@BradleyFest), “In New Jersey, finding my name in beer.,” Twitter, August 17, 2023, https://twitter.com/BradleyFest/status/1692312460148011214. (Is Twitter still Twitter when it’s X: yes | no.)
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 three volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015), The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), and 2013–2017: Sonnets (LJMcD Communications, 2024), the first volume in his ongoing American sonnet sequence. 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.