eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2016)
The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten's experiments in what he calls "shaped prose"—a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the "little edges" of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader's companion is available at http://fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819575067 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/19/2014 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
FRED MOTEN is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Arkansas, Poems (with Jim Behrle), I ran from it but was still in it, Hughson's Tavern, B Jenkins, The Feel Trio, and the critical works In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney).
Fred Moten examines black studies through the lenses of performance, poetry, and critical theory. He is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson's Tavern, The Feel Trio, and consent not to be a single being, among others. His most recent book, The Little Edges, was published by Wesleyan in December 2015, and The Feel Trio was shortlisted for the 2014 National Book Award. His essays and poems have appeared in publications like the South Atlantic Quarterly, Experimental Sound and Radio, and Hambone, as well as several anthologies and collections. He has spoken and performed for audiences around the globe. Moten is currently an English professor at University of California, Riverside, and teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He is also a member of the writing faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
fortrd.fortrn
To see this poem as it appears in the printed book, please click here.
that's what rodney asked about,
can you make what we already (do you remember/how did the people)
have? let it get around and get on in
complicity,
in scar city,
ar. complexcity
in complicita, la. here go a box with a lid on it. if you open it you can come into our world.
up in here you look
like cutty do. house
look like he up. if so,
don't you wanna go?
live, remote, preoccupied with breathing and black as machine ecology, iron man, all over the pan, all over the basin,
duone, chant carry pauses and actually live inside 'em, gift double, to see things and say can hear them vary, pearl,
from then beginning all gone inside, remember, threshold,
surround her separateness with bands but if I were a bell?
exhaustion makes life ever lasting. when I dance with
you I am the moved mover.
baby, you're a solid sender.
we pound plenty, baby, softened in our program, our transubstantial fade and crossfade bodies, baby.
take this and think about
me in the first place. begin in the real presence of my
skin, baby. you shook me!
your hand is my pocket.
I'm a pocket man. your hand is in my pocket. I fix broken rockets. you
are my starship. you're all I need. you send for me and I can't keep my self from coming, baby,
as I am, I have what I already have, I'm yours.
precision and humility in the experiment is written on the way you customize your
uniform, a ritual of lotion and stillness in the morning, 'fore you make it in to work
on the edge of your train
on the edge because you're driven to the edge in your violent correctness,
over the edge of what you're listening to like somebody listening to you.
you might
be one.
you might be someone that needs listening to. you might need somebody, too.
a lot of this is found in what we have. almost all of this belongs to you. are you gon' gimme some? naw, you on your way to work,
little sister. that's alright, young man. bye, baby.
the unspeakable tower is what they did.
our shit has some names and sometimes they sound good at the bottom of it, therefore proceed against that little pill-head fucker that correct people's pronunciation.
fotrad.fotran ain't really got to where we got somewhere to go,
premature precepts dripped from deferred foreskins,
brought out from nowhere with forecepts with no receptacle,
but early on my grammar cleft my palette with okras
and blues. mimi said don't listen to them blues.
she knew she should because her shoe moved. she knew the man playing ray charles was ray charles. she put the jazz-cri on an early stove, cooked it down to a low gravy,
(with this trade, these little fours, your dirty palette, a savory train between in blood sorbet)
let it dry and made a vase out of it. we poured what was in it on our greens and blues and ochres, our loud flavors and the tree we danced around, the tree we made a movie around,
against that little pill-head fucker that correct people's predestination.
fo fo fo four four four
fore fore fore foe foe foe
semper fe, semper fi, motherfucker,
fume instead of kill. the incident in crosshatch is a burst of whispers. a mouthpiece and burred air. in need turned out to be our desire. a video
of the archive in play. it's some indelicate
news on the wall. something in silence for everything that everybody ever wanted. cri sis for everything that ever burned inside.
my baby's black representational space is another world.
black workers of the other world unite up in there, one named peanut the other named bush, making shit up in
chance theater, which is a truck farm in exploded rows.
my baby's black representational space is the south dakota hills. you like the comfortable surprise of its location? see how it travels? it's other than itself and
it sells itself that way. whose little self are you? mine.
my baby's black representational space is all over the
place so he got to move his body. body cut the neuro
typical field with a razor in the shape of a basketball.
somebody sing give me body you can hear it bounce.
my baby's black representational space is a black head on
some black skin. in the city of the blemish on the blemish of delivery the mayor's name is da mayor; but you can call her woody or few or mole in the ground or at your service.
hand up to your ear
To see this poem as it appears in the printed book, please click here.
(for you to find a way to sound and move, dont rhymes with robert's selmer like a plastic fuse, to blow out the emperor's
ambience with shouting in the theological desert of the city. you bring with you to galleries an echo of shipping, an avenue
warehouse, a river bea, and the prendergast machine is discipline against an echo of shopping, too much arrangement in
the head, susan's sound through store-bought power. that show of shows is a bill of lading, a business pleasure, and the auctioneer's nervous run is overtaken by worn shadow, homeless ware is walking, the armory is walking away, some nervous
agent in the air)
Dont Rhine and Robert Sember 1.24.12/3.29.12
CAConrad, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, M. NourbeSe Philip 4.16-20.12
laurie prendergast and Susan Jahoda (diving) 5.5.12
You are a base community
Apprehend before the sound. The cargo, the brutalized openings, which also surround it, but only for a time that can't be measured, in permeance. 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. Lose your
composure in repose, at rest, in descent, in the general murmur, a general antagonism of noise, the fugue of the absolutely poor, her gift of diving, her depressive largesse of lifting, in study, in series, her overlapped happenings of attendance, lapsed concentricities, submerged cyphers, like a bunch of little churches and ballrooms with open doors.
You are the bottom
We care about each other so militantly, with such softness, that we exhaust ourselves, and then record,
in the resonance of our slightly opened mouths, the sound of that, in the absence of the enemy that we keep making.
A disconnected movement, as if preoccupied, held already in the beautiful gathering afternoon, carried by one
another as one another's play mamas. Listen to the sound through one another's skin. Preserve the sound through membrane and water, to find our form in corresponding.
Your body is a mixing board
Come take a listening walk and admire your hand twisting. The listening is in watching how you move to
touch in sounding, brushing up against your friend, to see how his position sounds to make the music we are making by moving the people moving around. Make soundworks out of rustling to notice the material that
comes up on us, that we come upon, do something with. Do something with the sound like it's your friend,
like you met her at the quadrophenic playground.
You are a child, in a club
One night in San Francisco, off the impeccable to fray nailed stud of a live black hawk, of the more and less
than full divided air of a mystophone, through her diviséd air, o master of ceremonies miles, like a speaker in a
whisper with a monster, say form a pit and brush somebody hand. Make a mix in violent rubbing till your work
is gone. Make a prompt a foursquare then the squares collapse as separates but other than before till work is made to disappear to register its fields as present in the sound and its sources. Everybody brush somebody
hand till work is gone to the alternate slam. How long can you sustain the foursquare? This is how to make
little works just walking down the street, collaborating with the hand you brush, as shawls serrate the length of her arcade.
You want sensory issues
Curate the sound you make by jumping. Flap your hands before your eyes. In lengthening, become from another country. Imitate the movement but expel more air. Say this is your house and run a lap in it but dance
with the air immediately around the ones who seem at home. Repeat a word or phrase, slightly louder, up three steps then down, like a color block in a Hoffman painting. For a minute say every letter of every word
but slowly. Hold somebody hand up to your ear.
hard enough to enjoy
To see this poem as it appears in the printed book, please click here.
Ralph Lemon was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Queen Records' infant archivist and rhythmicon, his contributions to the theory of gravity, a flowncrawled chorograph of attractions breathing the variously collided particles of isley, collins, wilder, troutman, fleetwood and all the ungendered fraternal players
of southwest Ohio, are crucial to that terrible arc of funk and flesh of which impossible mothers speak with
electromagnetic slide. Later, charged with the blackness of physics, its extralegal social surrealities, in search of
conceptual thaw having survived the river's violent floes and squalls, its seizing distancing, but drawn to the river of rivers of rivers, Lemon began a long series of residencies in itinerance. His efforts, filed under
vanishing in binding, disappear in the world's most important collections and divisions.
Our clearing is patrolled as a series of air, spirals in conjunction made by pointed running. It was affirmation
where we learned how to talk by walking pointedly, to organize air offstride by tapping, like a lion. My touch,
my mouth all fixed to say these words, my listening in winter, my mirror glancing. Big-eyed cartoon, all this in
there as an audible surface that my eye wants to help you think about as you feel me. Feel me? That's why I always ask you if you feel me. Because I know you feel me. I ask you if you feel me because I know you feel me.
Another alignment of questions and I could be having a coke with you. I could be riding around with you,
like
elements in an open field, spinning in ourselves till our supports collapse into a choir, a batterie of iron on the floor, a pallet on the floor, a plywood blanket for some intimate unrest. All these layers of not returning to
before and before, here come here come here come, are flowers made of crystal and crusted syrup. Our seasoning is hambone and our self-abuse our swirling coattails and chant array. Big-legged cartoon, perform
our box of wonders from the book of wonder.
This order winds its way around the hills out from Oxford. Everybody fell in love with everybody hollering,
everybody waiting on everybody whining, everybody tapping and wobbling, the kettle whining, everybody
struggling to play, everybody staying while everybody come and go. We couldn't wait for labor day in Othar's bright-edged fusillade and savor. We couldn't wait without remembering them buried all together,
Folosade
Thomas echoing and leading, winding at the head of our wailing abbey's forming with pleasure in abandon,
tarrying, tasting in abandonment in stepping and studying why we can't.
Gone nowhere, gone everywhere, here come marching. This burled expanse of welcome homelessness sound
like marching. Here come here come last time. I sat and waited for you to leave. Ain't I gon' see you no more?
How can you stay? The southern question of travel makes a joyful noise and moves slowly in awareness. Now
we can speculate on the relay of our common activity, make a circle round our errant roots. Dancing is what
we make of falling. Music is what we make of music's absence, the real presence making music underneath.
I'm exhausted so my soul is rested.
Ralph Lemon was born in Alternative, Mississippi. Like many alternatives of Mississippi he was schooled in a
chain of monastic launchpads, reading underconceptual repair, making arrangements and the theory of
repercussion. In repose in the experiment, set at an angle, just a-pausin' while a-sittin' and a-rockin', just posed
against standing, still inclined to engage in forensic study of the auction block of ideas and its stained wood but open also to her echo, his efflorescence, nothing — what else can you expect from corrosion in bloom?
corrosion in bloom is all you can expect; all you can expect is everything — is hard enough to enjoy.
nothing, even more, and another.
To see this poem as it appears in the printed book, please click here.
your things invite me so
quietly, I thought your
legs were so beautifully shaven, your space was
light and different and
your surfaces, and your
brush, your application
is a movie with so many
sequels, such multiple
indemnities and hsian
potentials burn, nothing even more and another.
aj, this for underneath your beautiful proof of concept.
To see this poem as it appears in the printed book, please click here.
Man, it is but
it ain't fold or
fold in or lay out or spin or walk awayarray arrange. frere
keep fading
aanic tape and flash and shit and broken stream
I thought was streamed with broken
are
rhythm where we went awry
we a broken category?
lull between pings but no
hard
inside pulse and more than
open enough to not get bothered or to stand being bothered by overlap or by
somebody watching or by
somebody else
but if it is
somebody else or if he
is
here this could be her
sound.
eve is a texture dave is centering.
To see this poem as it appears in the printed book, please click here.
eve is a texture
dave is centering our whirring be
your bird ok
in government
and binding
nothingness is
in capacity
a moisture
unsurrounds our gathering
and pouring our came and
sent our drop
of chocolate of
a song in hand
our open bowl in studio in assyrian air in oil in serenade interrogate our leaves and air in saying
savoring of air
in stir from talk
of searing and
enhanced to hand
our salad is your
touch extreme
and braided fingers dressed in sugar
through emulsion like a spur your
final plural curve
mudede waters like josé muñificent.
To see this poem as it appears in the printed book, please click here.
the ordinary groove is strange. my accent be off
like that. the fremde, friend, is an ordinary fray.
you the from thing. shake your grove thing till
we're reunited at the angels' library. an annual
fade announced off fenian fenelonian fanonian
tranche but also that flange and quequenian la
as a rainbow of saints. my legacy is elegant but
found. aw, just appreciate/the little things I do.
the unusual threads and thrends are like doves.
are you every day and I really do love you every
day for a long time in another tongue? curving
is expecting you and we been studying the city
for a long time in our way of walking away with
the cutaway chute and coat and chassis by hand.
wait for it
To see this poem as it appears in the printed book, please click here.
you remain the future in our present like an accent pause that gramsci had to measure. living better now that double tap stop till then till that is your time we're in love with waiting. we can't so we can surprise so we can
attend and take urgent care. the erotic cure, which shows up as, which gives us, so that it ought to give us,
pause is our propulsion. who do what's been done can't wait for it and can't walk off. who recognize the
future don't wait on us, but because they don't know about service, about what it is to be an instrument,
decide they just ain't gon' wait. they miss something, they missing something, our liveness in reverb, this re:
that we refer to something, that we regard something, that we in regard to something else. they tell us what they think they know and we wait till they understand. I'm tired of waiting till they understand. see you later.
the gramsci monument
To see this poem as it appears in the printed book, please click here.
if the projects become a project from outside then the projects been a project forever. held
in the projects we the project they stole. we steal
the project back and try to give it back to them.
come on, come get some of this project. we protect
the project with our open hands. the architect is in mining and we dispossess him. we protect the project by handing.
let's bust the project up. let's love the project. can the
projects be loved? we love the projects. let's move the projects. we project the projects. I'm just projecting the project's mine to give away. I'm not mine when I dispossess me I'm just a projection.
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. we the
outside that violates our block. we violate the auction block
experiment. we pirates of ourselves and others. we the friend
of all. we the cargo. are you my treasure? you all I need. are you my wish? come be my sunship. you are
my starship. you meant to fly but don't be late. I dream
the sails of the project from the eastern shore. plywood sails the city island past the enclave mirror till the bricks arise.
at the fugitive bar and the food be tasting good. kitchenette
my cabin and flesh be burning in the hold. I love the way
you smell. your cry enjoys me. let me taste the way you think.
let's do this one more time while the project repeats me. the project
incompletes me. I am replete with the project. your difference folds me in your arms, my oracle with sweets, be my
confection engine. hear my plea. tell me how to choose.
tell me how to choose the project I have chosen. are you
the projects I have chosen? You are the project I choose.
Excerpted from "The Little Edges"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Frederick Moten.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
fortrd.fortrn
hand up to your ear
hard enough to enjoy
nothing, even more, and another.
aj, this for underneath your beautiful proof of concept.
eve is a texture dave is centering.
mudede waters like josé muñificent.
wait for it
the gramsci monument
all topological last friday evening
all
all up on that t-shirt
akomfrahgment
dance warm
sweet nancy wilson saved frank ramsay.
I lay with francis in the margin.
ra, your gignity our echo.
grad grind, gentles, till the park is gone.
jaki byard, blues for smoke
test
laura (made me listen to
Acknowledgments
What People are Saying About This
“The poems in The Little Edges work the margins of language—the African American vernacular with its powerfully kinetic resources as well as the more elevated and elegant language of the academy—blending and juxtaposing them in ways that result in an utterly fresh poetic idiom.”
“The poetic vision, or sound, of The Little Edges is remarkable in its range of reference, deep music, surprise at every turn, softness of lyric address coupled with political meditation, and undeniable beauty.”
"The poetic vision, or sound, of The Little Edges is remarkable in its range of reference, deep music, surprise at every turn, softness of lyric address coupled with political meditation, and undeniable beauty."—Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
"The poems in The Little Edges work the margins of language—the African American vernacular with its powerfully kinetic resources as well as the more elevated and elegant language of the academy—blending and juxtaposing them in ways that result in an utterly fresh poetic idiom.""—M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!
"The poetic vision, or sound, of The Little Edges is remarkable in its range of reference, deep music, surprise at every turn, softness of lyric address coupled with political meditation, and undeniable beauty."—Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning