Such a fugitive poetics is equally and not incidentally a politics.5 This is the point signaled by the titles of the two sections of “barbara lee” just quoted: “The Poetics of Political Form” (inverting the name of an essay collection edited by Charles Bernstein)6 and “The Unacknowledged Legislator.” Thom Donovan has noted that Moten’s influential first book of criticism, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), centers around the argument that “the resistance of the object (that is, the body of the erstwhile slave seeking its freedom in spirit, what cannot be possessed and which yet possesses that body in privileged moments of expression) models a form of organization, responsibility, discourse, and political and social economy” that is nothing other than a way to describe the black radical tradition itself.7 Poetry, then, likewise serves—precisely through its “difficulty”: that is, in the ways it conjures language into form that resists the understanding (by “sliding away from the proposed” through what Moten describes as the “placement of the truth or of the secret in that space of tension or movement that is characterized by obscurity and indirection” [BJ 108])—as an enactment of the “freedom drive.” As Donovan observes, in Moten’s work, “poetry becomes the site where the resistance of the object is performed; poetry is also an extension of this object. It is, in other words, prosthetic. Poetry is the rupture, it is the break, recircuiting and inscribing a genealogy of sound forms.”8 For Moten, the “irreducible and ongoing” sound of fugitive poetics is “the sound of the resistance to slavery; the critique of (private) property and of the proper” (BJ 108).
With its torrent of names, allusions, and voices, Moten’s poetry performs an “ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of the surplus” (IB 26). The challenge and the frustration—but no small part of the pleasure, too—of reading it has everything to do with a sensation of the intellect not being granted a place to settle amid the flow of “too many notes.”9 In the illuminating 2004 interview with editor Charles Rowell reprinted as an appendix to B Jenkins (2010), Moten explains:
I think poetry is what happens or is conveyed on the outskirts of sense, on the outskirts of normative meaning. I’m trying precisely to work on that edge, and I assume that the content that is conveyed on that edge, on that fault line, is richer, deeper, and fuller than those things that are given in writing that passes for direct. (BJ 104)
At the same time, this conviction results neither in the nonsense poetry of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear nor in the sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters or Christian Bök. Moten’s poetry is infused with historical reference and dense philosophical reflection. It is a poetry that refuses to relinquish the impulse to theory even in the throes of its music.
To note the parallels between Moten’s scholarship and his poetry is also to suggest that these strands of his writing must be read in tandem or in dialogue. At times, they seem to converge, or to be mutually informing modes of inquiry. If his poetry is characterized by its recourse to analysis and critical commentary, his scholarship sometimes gravitates toward a surplus lyricism, as in this passage:
Stopped for a juked-up minute, this manic, monkish, Thelonial, disobediently Jeromeboyish homegirl at study, learning dark arts on the Octavian highway of Loseiana, in the indebtedness of mutual aid, for which she remains without credit, also remains to be (im)properly thought, which is to say, celebrated.10
In the interview with Rowell, Moten reflects on this interarticulation, describing the putative oppositions between poetry and criticism as “constraints that enable us when we resist them.” Ultimately, he comments, “I want my criticism to sound like something, to be musical and actually to figure in some iconic way the art and life that it’s talking about. At the same time, I also want my poetry to engage in inquiry and to intervene, especially, in a set of philosophical and aesthetic questions that are, I think, of profound political importance.” He adds that for him, such ambidexterity is “a specifically Afro-diasporic protocol” (BJ 99–100), thereby reminding us just how crucial such an interplay has been to a remarkable range of black poet-critics, including Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Amiri Baraka, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Audre Lorde, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, and M. NourbeSe Philip.
To say that poetry, and even critical scholarship, can be musical—can aspire to the condition of music—is not to say that, as writing, they somehow preserve some essence of the medium of sound. On the contrary, if poetry “records” and “amplifies” music, according to Moten, it does so only by radically “transforming” it. Such a transformation is carried out, however, “by way of something that already lies at that music’s very heart. This root seems to me to be unavailable and secret, like a chain of receding events, any one of which might fool you into calling it an origin. It is, nevertheless, there and one prepares to get at it by going out” (BJ 103). By “going out,” Moten means that his is inherently and unavoidably an experimental poetics, but only in the sense that, as he notes, all black art is and must be, because “black social life” itself is experimental: “our experimentation happens in and against the backdrop of our having been subjected to an experiment” (the radical social experiment of the slave trade).11
The transmutation of the secret that happens in art, Moten suggests, can only show up as “obscurity” (BJ 107)—and this is the gambit of a poetics that constantly risks being misrecognized or dismissed. But to make poetic meaning “subordinate to the sound, subordinate to a kind of feeling” is also to say that such an art can bring about what Donovan calls “a new distribution of the senses (or of common sense).”12 In the prose poem “frank ramsay/nancy wilson” in B Jenkins, there is a passage that demands just this sort of a poetics of recording and affective recalibration: “Be my ontograph and discompose. If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—enjoyed in what has been enjoyed” (49). In Hughson’s Tavern, the poem “where the blues began” makes this point through the doublet posited in the first and last lines of the poem:
where the theoreticians will become senses in their practice
where the theoreticians will not be not seeing, hearing
where the theoreticians will sear, the theoretician is a seer
where the theoreticians will be seen and heard in their practice
where the theoreticians will touch themselves
where the theoreticians will become sensual in their practice
where the reverse will always be in excess
where the sequence is for nono and maxine
where reading and recite this scene to John Gwin, my daddy
where they go plot paradise, blue bolivar, boll and marvel
where mask and boll and cut and fry and groove
where the senses will become theoreticians in their practice (HT 77)
Again, it would be a mistake to overstate this point, as though Moten’s poetry were a tissue of sonic substance evacuated of all semantic content. On the contrary, one of the ways the members of the motley crew recognize each other is that some of them know who Nono and Maxine and John Gwin were and are. When one of the eleven-line poems in the final section of The Feel Trio concludes with the invocation “o, for a muse of fire music!” (FT 74), the allusion to the opening of the Prologue of Shakespeare’s Henry V (“O for a Muse of fire”) is still easily detectable, only deflected or recast in the direction of Archie Shepp’s 1965 album Fire Music, which is to say in the direction of a muse found not in the “brightest heaven of invention” to light the stage (Shakespeare), but instead in the cauterizing flame of a music improvised in the wake of political tragedy—which (since Shepp’s album includes his recitation of his powerful eulogy for Malcolm X) is also to say a music that already contains or anticipates poetry.13 You sense the transmutation, in other words, precisely to the degree that you measure the distance from the original.
The populatedness of Moten’s poetry is perhaps most striking in B Jenkins, in which the individua
l poems are titled with a welter of individual names: musicians, actors, athletes, poets, academics, political activists, politicians, as well as the poet’s friends, wife, sons, and mother. If the poems can be read as oblique portraits of the named individuals, then the table of contents might be described as the roll call for (or a shout-out to) a sort of honorary roster or, better, “visionary company”14 of the direct acquaintances and distant influences assembled behind and within Moten’s writing—the presences that animate it in one way or another. Once more, the majority of the references are familiar or easily traceable: if you aren’t aware that Barbara Lee, as the representative of California’s 13th District in the East Bay, was the only member of either house of Congress to vote against the authorization of force in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, it’s not that hard to look her up.
The question posed by the book’s organization ultimately has to do with the connections among these very different sorts of animating presences, especially since a number of the poems have composite titles with not one, but two or three names: “william parker/fred mcdowell”; “thelma foote/lindon barrett”; “toni morrison/renee gladman.” In these instances, the names often bookend the poem, the first as a heading, and the second affixed at the end, a gnomic closing intonation. The composite titles make it difficult to read the poems as a portrait gallery of individuals in any simple sense. Instead, they perform relationality, sometimes hinting at ties between incongruous pairings. Some seem straightforward enough, when the individuals know each other or are related, or work in the same field (“jeanne moreau/miles davis”; “cecil taylor/almeida ragland”; “william parker/fred mcdowell”), while others seem much more tenuous (“billie holiday/roland barthes”; “sherrie tucker, francis ponge, sun ra”; “george gervin/michael fried”). In the first poem in the volume, named for the poet’s mother (“b jenkins”), there is a passage that seems to announce the rationale for this aspect of the book:
In the names away in blocks
with double names to interrupt and
gather, kept dancing in tight circles
between break and secret, vaulted
with records in our basement, where
the long-haired
hippies and afroblacks
all get together across the
tracks and they party, everybody sown
like grain and touched in stride. (BJ 1)
If the individuals are distributed into discrete poetic abodes or parcels of the cityscape (“blocks”), the “double names” come to “interrupt and gather”—severing the autonomy of each life invoked, and yet somehow simultaneously serving to yoke the pieces together, to make the blocks a kind of neighborhood. We are here invited to party in a basement with all the right people on the wrong side of the tracks, a slow dance suspended between eruption (“break”) and archivization, or burial (“secret, vaulted / with records”).
If they serve as a structural feature of B Jenkins, proper names are prevalent across the full body of Moten’s poetry, as in the announcement in the second part of The Feel Trio that “I grew up in a bass community in las vegas,” followed by a run-down: “louie vitale and sister mary. willie stargell and stephanie brown. lisé and boderick, / margaret, ousmane and jameela. deseretta mcallister. julia cotton and brian jackson / tennessee and scottie heron. greg robinson was lou rawls live” (FT 57). Some might well be neighborhood denizens, but some of these names resonate beyond the local (“willie stargell”; “scottie heron”), which possibly captures the special way that black social life can be imbued with a felt intimacy with a star athlete or singer who doesn’t even live in the same state. Elsewhere, names of individuals seem to assume the solidity or the monumentality of geographic markers, as in a poem that notes the “funked-up air from ja to mya, bobby to little esther” (HT 28). Most noticeably, proper names in Moten’s work are often used metaphorically, as though they encapsulate qualities that are apparent as soon as they are pronounced. Thus: “calculate / like a fat young minister, strokin’ like / clarence carter, increase like creflo / dollar” (BJ 2). Or: “the booming walk of goods / all over the buckled street like Fred / Hopkins” (BJ 24). Or: “my / running / puts down routes / like eugenie barbeau” (HT 1). Or: “the cold frenzy / up front like ahmad / jamal” (BJ 34). While this mode of name-dropping seems derived in part from the rhetoric of hip-hop, it also elaborates on that model and calls on a less predictable crew. In Moten, the names come to morph into predicate nominatives (“that pattern on the / edge is graphic patience higgins” [FT 11]) and even ersatz part participles (“living double is like seeing double, edge / indebted, octeted, lindon barretted” [FT 25]).
That the majority of names are not capitalized raises the question of whether they should indeed be read as “proper” nouns at all. If fugitive poetics sounds “the critique of (private) property and of the proper” (BJ 108), then perhaps naming in Moten’s work functions precisely to unravel or erode the presumed propriety of the individual name. We are made to hear names as the repository of an untamed, possibly unbounded range of association, rather than the mark of stable individuality. So when “walter benjamin/julian boyd” concludes with the announcement that “my friends are black like a country, move in the game like strangers, / break codes in the street, get loud on sundays in the streets, revive and / drink some, gamble and huff” (BJ 32), it is perhaps meant both as the invocation of a soundtrack to casual black camaraderie—via the Philadelphia songwriting team of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, composers of hits such as “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “Back Stabbers,” and “Me and Mrs. Jones”—and as a repertoire of activities among friends (who might, say, shoot craps or play a hand of bid whist while they sip).
Thom Donovan argues that the titular names of the poems in B Jenkins represent “a nonexclusive, however radically particular, community of beings who through their distributed proper names aneconomically mark an ongoing commons.”15 This isn’t incorrect, although I am not convinced—when one takes into account the centrifugal force of making-unproper in the way names are deployed in Moten’s writing—that names function simply or even primarily as emblems of “radical singularity.” In one 2015 interview, asked about Bessie Smith in this regard, Moten comments:
I don’t think I’m so committed to the idea of the radical singularity of Bessie Smith as I am committed to a kind of radicalization of singularity, that we now come to recognize under the name of Bessie Smith, which the figure, the avatar, that we now know as Bessie Smith was sent to give us some message about. I think of Bessie as an effect of sociality—she was sent by sociality to sociality, in that way that then allows us to understand something about how the deep and fundamental entanglement that we are still exists in relation to and by way of and as a function of this intense, radical, constant differentiation.16
At the legendary May 1953 concert at Massey Hall in Toronto that reunited a quintet featuring the titans of bebop (Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach), Parker mischievously introduced the band’s performance of “Salt Peanuts” by saying that the tune “was composed by my worthy constituent, Mr. Dizzy Gillespie.”17 It was a wisecrack and even a bit of a gibe, but beneath the apparent surface egotism, one might hear a sincere avowal of the ways the music is always, and only, a product of a collaborative ethos so profound that bandmates can only be described as formative parts of one another. If the individual name denotes a singularity, here, it is not that of a self-contained subject but instead is the marker of a specific social entanglement. The proliferation of names in Moten’s poetry is perhaps best understood as a similar sort of avowal. As Elizabeth Willis writes, his writing stages a kind of collectivity that is “not totalizing but decidedly partial: composed of the things to which we are partial and embracing the incompleteness inherent in our humanness.”18
If for some readers, Moten’s poetry might seem to “amount to no more than a stylistics,” nonetheless the “gift” it proffers is “more t
han you / can carry” (FT 87). Some of Moten’s most resonant and politically incisive writing starts from a sort of playful riffing along the axis of equivalence, teasing homophone and anagram into impossible, ungrounded webs of implication in order to intuit “the new possibilities of communication that might occur as a function of courting miscommunication” (BJ 105). One of the most astonishing single poems is the piece he was invited to write in August 2013 for the Gramsci Monument, the controversial temporary installation constructed and curated by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn at Forest Houses, a housing project in the Bronx.19 There are multiple allusions stitched into the verses—to Norman Connors’s 1976 hit song “You Are My Starship,” for instance; or to Frederick Douglass’s description of how seeing the “moving multitude” of ships on the Chesapeake Bay inspired his own dreams of freedom; or to Finally Got the News, the extraordinary 1970 film made by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit20—but Moten’s eponymous contribution, published in The Little Edges (32–33), is ultimately a searching meditation on the implications of the word “project” in relation not only to the sorry history of public housing in the United States but also to Hirshhorn’s own installation.
American Poets in the 21st Century Page 39