2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
The Little Edges is a short book with large, square pages. Fred Moten’s poems make the most of these even sides, or edges: lines sometimes fill the page horizontally and at others hug one margin tightly. Vertically, their uneven spacing mimics the syncopated rhythms of jazz. And it’s jazz that, quite literally, occasions The Little Edges. Its poems echo, evoke, describe, and annotate jazz performances, personae, and theory in the service of a “song impossible to sing and not to sing.” They take jazz’s capacity for barely-contained upheavals of sound to explore an “interplay of excess and poverty,” and they ask the poet as well as the reader, “What gives you the right to love black music, this irruption out of and into catastrophe?” Moten dedicates The Little Edges to Jose Esteban Muñoz, the prominent queer theorist and author of Cruising Utopia who died in 2013. In his review of Cruising Utopia, Moten praised “Muñoz’s critical refusal of queer pragmatism, his commitment to the utopian force of the radical attempt.”1 A commitment to the radical and a rejection of the merely pragmatic defines Moten’s poetics, and makes for poems that staunchly refuse many of the aims we traditionally associate with poetry – accounts, often narrative, of internal or external situations with a focus on resolution or closure. Instead, Moten’s poems are theoretical experiments in what words and phrases can do to conjure up individual achievements without narrative, how to create sites of shared experience that are not constrained by a single, authoritarian voice. If the book’s square shape provides it with
“TO SING PRAISE” a review by John Steen Fred Moten. The Little Edges. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015.
JOHN STEEN, a Winston-Salem native, lives in Atlanta, GA, where he teaches English. He received a BA in English from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University. Specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US poetry, poetics, and psychoanalysis, he has articles forthcoming in the edited collection Jean Daive: Narrative Sous Condition, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. FRED MOTEN, previously a professor at Duke University, lives in Los Angeles where he teaches English at the University of California-Riverside. He has authored six poetry books, including The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His critical works include In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013) co-authored with Stefano Harney. 1
James Moten, “The Beauty of José Esteban Muñoz,” rev. of Cruising Utopia (New York University Press, 2009) boundary 2 online, 10 Mar. 2014: web.
COURTESY OF JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN HUMANITIES INSTITUTE AT DUKE UNIVERSITY
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a box, the poems’ own edges create elaborate, expansive polygons. The reader opening The Little Edges can start by thinking about everything that happens in and in response to music. Many of these poems collect phrases that mimic what occurs during the act of listening, when the mind wanders, but with a purpose: “It’s an imprecision bordering on invasion to call this context, that // rapturous silence, shouting, composed in listening so we discompose ourselves in one another.” The unexpected and unexplained jump from “rapturous silence” to “shouting” sets the tone for the conviction that unceasing, sometimes disorienting, motion can drive poems. As we lose control in thrall to music, Moten’s poems are works of release, where new words like “thrends” (a combination of threads and “threnody,” the generic term for a mourning poem) contend with sentence structures that set grammar aside to ask urgent questions:
ABOVE Fred Moten in The Black Outdoors
speaker series, hosted by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, Durham, NC, 23 Sept. 2016