In the realm of art theory and practice, Fred Moten is probably best known as the coauthor, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, a book that explores what the Black radical tradition can contribute to contemporary social, political, aesthetic thought. But as Elizabeth Willis writes in the Boston Review, Moten is also an incredible poet. Willis reviews Moten’s two most recent poetry collections, The Little Edges and The Feel Trio, calling Moten a “grassroots revolutionary” poet. Here’s an excerpt:
Fugitivity, refuge, and refuse: within a few lines the poem has moved from slave ship to mother ship, from hold to cell, traversing a deep history of transatlantic captivity and intergalactic flight. In that trajectory, I hear Sun Ra’s imprisonment in Alabama as a conscientious objector and his Afrofuturist tuning to an elsewhere brought to earth by his music. I hear the literal and figurative hurricanes of Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice (1984), and I hear Katrina as a felt presence: a high-water low point in this country’s ongoing histories of race- and class-based neglect and straight-up state violence. There is running with and running from and running to here. There’s a twist, there’s a balm, there’s a kiss. The passage is at once a riff and a demonstration of know-how, survival, and informed resistance: “we know the score. we got a plan.” Where a reader anticipates pressure, she finds pleasure. In the compressed proximity of bodies in the block, chapel, hold, rocket ship is the transformative power of an underground.
Moten demonstrates poetry’s capacity to conduct the energy of a whirlwind.
Moten’s book of essays written in collaboration with Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), available both in print and as a free download, explores and theorizes these lived spaces as sites of ongoing study, where black culture remains both emergent and relentlessly under threat of disappearing into an assimilationist white hole. In The Undercommons as in the poems, Moten dismantles the poetics of witness. In place of the familiar formula—the presentation of what you believe because you have seen it—Moten offers the recognition of what you know because you feel it:
This feel is the hold that lets go (let’s go) again and again to dispossess us of ability, fill us with need, give us ability to fill need, this feel.
To feel is to make of understanding an embodied experience. When you have a feel for something, you get it. To feel need is human. When I feel you, you know I’m with you. And when you feel me, I feel that too. To do something real, you need to feel it. And that need means knowing that not-having-something is a way of having-something-else. The poem is not about answering need but valuing it, making it visible. This is one kind of “feel” in Moten, in motion, in the Trio. This is one turn of its revolution.
Image of Fred Moten by Kari Orvik. Via Boston Review.