Fred Moten’s sixth collection of poetry, The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2014), begins by immersing the reader in the space of its intricate poetics. “that’s what rodney asked about, ” declares the first line of “fortrd.fortrn, ” the inaugural piece of the collection. “can you make what we already (do | you remember/how did the people) / have? ” Turning back the reader to revisit the past, the lines hover over historical fact, using insinuation to rarefy the fixedness of the LA riots. Granting the event a deeper profundity through the interplay of enjambment and parenthesis, the poem pushes us to ponder the appositional relation between making, doing, and having—to readdress the questions that Rodney King put forward. “here go a box with a lid on it, ” the poem later offers: “if you open it you can come into our world. ” Only this world offered not as some hermeneutic reward beyond the initial complexities, but rather as the same world already shared by poet and reader and enriched by its complexity.
To match their intricate syntax, the poems in The Little Edges are visually arranged on the page in elaborate configurations that Moten calls “shaped prose ”: open-field compositions that intercalate fragments of verse and prose with a prominent use of the page’s whiteness. Across the range of poetry collected here, which includes several occasional pieces, the through-line is a constant ludic interaction with the page’s surface. This is how The Little Edges expands Moten’s concern for poetry’s worlding capacities—by placing the reader in the liminal spaces of language and meaning, in the marginal positions suggested by the collection’s title.
At certain moments The Little Edges offers its poetic ambitions with distinct clarity. Take the poem “all, ” which begins with the straightforward statement, “this complex word is an experiment. All. ” Conferring a certain illocutionary force to the word, “all ” begins to frame a recurrent motive: the continual rehearsal of poetry’s evocative potential, materialized here precisely as the persistent exploration of the distinct and changing multiplicities that the word “all ” can summon in each poem and in each utterance. Moten’s “all, ” however, does not envision absolute totalities. Pointing to its own generic affinity with experimental writing, “all ” disregards the possible metaphysical connotations of the term and instead retrieves the contingency inherent to the act of experimentation. And experimentation, in Moten’s writing, is never far from improvisation and music. Less a synthesis than a playful roll call, “all ” evades coalescing into the uniformity of its title; instead it fragments this unity into the differential multiplicity that continual experimentation yields. Within “all ” there runs an irreducible sociality that reveals the experimenter as one among others: “we gathered all our little alls, our little nothings, and at // our sailing he had brought his little all for a venture, on a stylus. ”
It would be hard to overestimate Moten’s investment in collectivity. His poetics of the social is marked by a hyper-awareness of its always being (in) a social scene. His writing departs from a skeptical understanding of the poet as an isolated individual. This skepticism, coming from a poetry premised on the capacity to enact or flesh out social interactions, produces a felicitous effect on the reader. Moten’s approach starts from the premise of necessary human codependence: “as I am, I have what I already have, I’m yours. ” Such an approach brings Moten right back to the act of experimentation: it emerges from sustained scrutiny and meditation on the particular history and expressivity of jazz, where the commitment to codependence is cognate to the act of listening in general. This is the reason why the sociality of Moten’s poetry so often takes the form of a latent aurality that assumes not only listeners and interlocutors but also other contrapuntal voices and sounds beyond the purview of the text itself. The suggestive title “hand up to your ear ” captures this kind of scene, where sound is portrayed as haptic and corporeal, conducive to the very bodily contact that produces and preserves sociality itself: “Listen to the sound through one another’s skin. Preserve the sound / through membrane and water, to find our form in corresponding. ”
Rather than the canonical bard speaking to and for his audience, Moten puts himself in affinity with the jazz ensemble, with the musician among musicians. In “excerpts from european episode, ” the opening section of his series on pianist Jaki Byard (here deemed “a sociologist ”), Moten describes “the history of the soloist who is not one, of one in nothingness in cherry and / choir, ” which could very well describe Moten’s own poetic persona. As with “all, ” this poem builds up from a conceptual tension between poverty and excess, nothingness and self, dispelling any antithetical oppositions in favor of a mutual bond. The poem carries on by diffusing the figure of the soloist, letting openness predominate as the dominant figure: “the history of the soloist who is not one, of one in nothingness in cherry and // choir, of things in blossom in aperture, a stray horn through a crack in the wall, the narrows between the open // mouth of the wall, the decreasing permanence of the wall in open air. ” Moten’s lines often break out this way and display their kinship with projective verse, where the poem is allowed the liberty to meander and take precedence over the poet.
A similarly recurrent feature of The Little Edges is Moten’s propensity to namedrop. (In fact, the book’s dust jacket advertises an online reader that one supposes could help contextualize all these proper names. Unfortunately, it offers little more than what a meticulous online search could.) If at the sonorous level Moten’s poetry enacts the social scene of music, at the referential level it ramifies into multiple historical and cultural nodes. Counting the pieces whose titles incorporate proper names (“the gramsci monument, ” “mudede waters like josé muñificent. ”), along with the casual allusions to musicians (Morton Feldman, George Clinton, Cecil Taylor, Nancy Wilson) and the references to film and television (The Wire, Do The Right Thing), The Little Edges seems intent on laying down a map of its cultural and intellectual bearings.
One instance of this bricolage is “spanish tinge no. 1, ” also part of the series on Jaki Byard, which links the pianist with Ferdinand II of Aragon: “like maroon speed and iberian note blacking on the loosaphone, when ferdinand was thinking // of expansion, wondering where the surplus would come from, wondering what the surplus was, wary as all his // cups began to fade, the theory of itinerant note blacking and line worrying was celebrating a thousand years of / bursting from the writing of its practice like a star. ” As the poem’s syntax begins to trace the fast movement of the Spanish fleet, only to interrupt it with the appearance of Ferdinand and his static pondering over the finances of the Spanish empire, Moten stresses the contrast between the simultaneous thought of transatlantic expansion and the overarching motion of this still indeterminate practice. Belittled in its lower-case spelling and engulfed by the movement that precedes and follows it, the proper name cedes its individual primacy (or in this case its royal sovereignty) to the force of this centrifugal expansion. The fragment orbits around the colloquial and polysemous term “blacking, ” which is Moten’s way of evoking collective black experience through the tradition of Byard’s trade. Cohabitating the same poem, these referents open up a scene of historical and cultural friction that quickly turns political. Further on the poem declares defiantly: “the venereal nation under our // feet won’t even have kings for a day. ” No less central to Moten’s interests is how the poem’s figure of artistic creation, the bursting star, “was already there as something else from someplace else // always. ” Pointing to a certain immanence sustaining the poetic act, where poiesis approaches metamorphosis, Moten envisions art as a transhistorical practice that remains continuous beyond the discrepancies of its forms.
The meaning of this figure resonates strikingly with the recurrent lyricism of The Little Edges, which works like apostrophic address but differs in one crucial respect. Moten does not turn to the traditionally sanctioned repositories of poetic value but rather works through the lyric presence of African American vernacular: “when he ready to get up and do his thing, when he wants to get into it, man, it’s paramilitary // theory. ” Moten’s lyrical address, in a sense still complying with being overheard, stands as one of his most noticeable traits, yoking his theoretical sophistication to his musicality: “we pound plenty, baby, softened in our program, our transubstantial fade and crossfade bodies, baby. ” This is also where Moten’s political project takes its roots, in the articulation of an ageless tradition that finds its present in African American forms of sociality. As “the gramsci monument ” puts it: “projection’s just us that’s who we are that’s who // we be. we always be projecting. that’s all we have. / we project the outside that’s inside us. ” That is, Moten’s poetry strategically envisions a project in the literal sense, projecting into the future the surviving collective experience that connects past and present.
June 2017
This review was published in Issue 60:3.