Fred Moten

Poet and Cultural Critic

New York, New York

2018 USA Fellowship

Fred Moten was born in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1962 and raised there and in Kingsland, Arkansas. He is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition; Hughson’s Tavern, B. Jenkins, The Feel Trio, The Little Edges, The Service Porch and consent not to be a single being. He is co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and A Poetics of the Undercommons and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? Moten lives in New York with his partner, Laura Harris and their children, Lorenzo and Julian. He teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

Portrait photo by Bettye Miller, courtesy University of California, Riverside.

Donor -This award was generously supported by The Rockefeller Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 07.08.2024

Writing

It’s not that I want to say that poetry should or can be disconnected from having something to say; it’s just that everything I want to say eludes me. But if I caught it I wouldn’t want it and I imagine you wouldn’t want it either. Maybe poetry is what happens on the bus between wanting and having. I used to think it was what happened on the bus between Oakland and Berkeley. And it was, too, like violet and Texas in peoples’ voices, a whole bunch of subtle transmissions broken off by stops and bells, the percussion of riding, mobile contact, slow symposium. But now, even in the absence of my private office, I still want to move and so I have to move but never get there in this whole extended region of not being there, of stopping and saying not there, not there, and of that being, in the end, pretty much all I have to say. What I want to say is that having something to say is subordinate in the work of being true to the social life in somebody else’s sound and grammar, its placement in my head, my placement in the collective head as it moves on down the line. The itinerant ensemble arrangement of the 40, and sometimes of the 15, is also where I began to learn to move and live and think in poetry. Now I want to transfer what I’m learning as a practice of revision on the edge where ethics and aesthetics are in parallel play. Some kind of homeless shift between reading and writing that emerges in a class or set as our cut-up schedule, a diverse list of things, point to point restlessness, interlocking schemes of material breaks, the constantly renewed syllabus of a new composers guild in the middle of enjoying itself. What we will have come together to try to do would start to look like what we were doing when we came together to enjoy ourselves, handing over saying what we want for one another, to one another, in and out of words.

It's not that I want to say, 2010