Fred Moten lives in Durham, North Carolina,
where he teaches in the Duke University
Department of English.
He's author of Arkansas, published
2000, In the Break, The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition, 2003, I ran from it but was still
in it, 2007, Hughson's Tavern in 2008, and his most recent work
B Jenkins, 2010.
Encountering a Fred Moten poem for the first time
invariably recalls other firsts, for me,
listening to Eric Dolphy's 1964 Blue Note
release, Out to Lunch!, a jazz giant
and dedicated innovator, whom among others, Moten
evokes in his syncopated, at times atonal phrasing.
In Moten's work, the poem is treated as inquiry
into both the hearings and mishearings of language.
In his own words, Moten informs us,
I'm trying to write poems that are situated
in relation to this question.
How is it that a work can bear content, have something to say,
while not being wholly bound to the constraints
and requirements of making meaning?
To this, he offers an answer of sorts saying,
I want to write poems that recognizably inhabit,
but in some kind of underground or fugitive way,
the space between the laws of music and the laws of meaning.
Though Fred Moten's poem's maybe challenging
in their semantic and syntactic demands on the reader,
I find them welcoming in their want to be embodied,
inscribed, and listened to.
Perhaps what draws me back to Moten's work
is a tremendous depth of intelligence behind the music,
an intelligence that bears in mind the Black diaspora
and failed reconstructionist ideologies,
not to mention the long history of racial and power inequities
found in the poetic.
In any case, Moten's poetry asks us to listen anew
and to occupy with him this fugitive space between music
and meaning.
As it is here in my reading, we get
a sense of what the commons could look like.
Please join me in welcoming to the podium Fred Moten.
[APPLAUSE]