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Fred Moten lives in
Durham, North Carolina,

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where he teaches in
the Duke University

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Department of English.

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He's author of
Arkansas, published

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2000, In the Break, The
Aesthetics of the Black Radical

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Tradition, 2003, I ran
from it but was still

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in it, 2007, Hughson's Tavern in
2008, and his most recent work

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B Jenkins, 2010.

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Encountering a Fred Moten
poem for the first time

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invariably recalls
other firsts, for me,

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listening to Eric
Dolphy's 1964 Blue Note

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release, Out to
Lunch!, a jazz giant

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and dedicated innovator,
whom among others, Moten

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evokes in his syncopated,
at times atonal phrasing.

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In Moten's work, the poem
is treated as inquiry

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into both the hearings and
mishearings of language.

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In his own words,
Moten informs us,

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I'm trying to write
poems that are situated

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in relation to this question.

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How is it that a work can bear
content, have something to say,

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while not being wholly
bound to the constraints

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and requirements
of making meaning?

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To this, he offers an
answer of sorts saying,

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I want to write poems
that recognizably inhabit,

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but in some kind of
underground or fugitive way,

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the space between the laws of
music and the laws of meaning.

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Though Fred Moten's
poem's maybe challenging

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in their semantic and syntactic
demands on the reader,

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I find them welcoming in
their want to be embodied,

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inscribed, and listened to.

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Perhaps what draws me
back to Moten's work

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is a tremendous depth of
intelligence behind the music,

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an intelligence that bears
in mind the Black diaspora

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and failed reconstructionist
ideologies,

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not to mention the long history
of racial and power inequities

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found in the poetic.

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In any case, Moten's poetry
asks us to listen anew

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and to occupy with him this
fugitive space between music

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and meaning.

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As it is here in
my reading, we get

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a sense of what the
commons could look like.

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Please join me in welcoming
to the podium Fred Moten.

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[APPLAUSE]

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