The Little Edges

by Fred Moten

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.

Genres: Poetry, American

96 pages, Hardcover

First published December 9, 2014

About the author

Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works), B. Jenkins (Duke University Press), The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions) and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia). His current projects include two critical texts, consent not to be a single being (forthcoming from Duke University Press) and Animechanical Flesh, which extend his study of black art and social life, and a new collection of poems, The Little Edges.

In 2009 Moten was Critic-in-Residence at In Transit 09: Resistance of the Object, The Performing Arts Festival at the House of World Cultures, Berlin and was also recognized as one of ten “New American Poets” by the Poetry Society of America; in 2011 he was a Visiting Scholar and Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute; in 2012, he was Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and a member of the writing faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College; and in 2013 he was a Guest Faculty Member in the Summer Writers Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa Institute. He was also a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine from 2002 to 2004 and a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York from 2001 to 2002.

Moten served as a member of the Board of Managing Editors of American Quarterly and has been a member of the Editorial Collectives of Social Text and Callaloo, and of the Editorial Board of South Atlantic Quarterly. He is also co-founder and co-publisher (with Joseph Donahue) of a small literary press called Three Count Pour.

Reviews

[dc · Rating 5 out of 5]

like how the marching band's bass drum takes over your chest, this.

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fred Moten is a poet and philosopher who doesn’t feel he owes anything to the demands of accessibility. This book of poetry is cryptic and impenetrable, and sometimes more magical for it, but sometimes very frustrating.

It took me some reading to acclimate myself to the formal element of this writing, which I would consider experimental poetry. Moten calls it shaped prose, and though some of the pieces have a more traditional structure, the longer and more significant ones are composed of fragmented lines over multiple pages. This can make it difficult to find the thread of many of these pieces, but it helps in certain ways... it demands deep attention, and it makes the phrases resonate across the text in ways that are strange and musical and unexpected.

There are a lot of references to social and cultural figures throughout the book, and I fear I missed one useful access point by glossing over them without doing more research. As it is, I found several of the poems to be very compelling — musical, and tactile and hypnotic — even if some of the other others lost me in their particular forms of defamiliarization.

Moten is genuinely skilled with rhythm and disruption, writing across multiple levels of meaning to play tricks with our expectations. There is a lot to appreciate about Little Edges. However, it’s pretty experimental. Your mileage may vary.

[Dallas Swindell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moten’s shaped prose runs currents through scales both grand and personal in the poems of The Little Edges. He is picking apart words, phrases, chance encounters, and recurrent places fastening the people within them into a rhythm he slyly conducts. The thematic clarity of each collection rides its own current in between the lines and reflections he delicately weaves into one another. His often second person characters balance, “on the edge because you’re driven to the edge in your violent correctness,” pegged into boxes and biomes where you have your own, limited freedoms. Many of the poems take a closer look at the expression of those freedoms, taking the always present unthinkable and finding ways to sublimate from it “pleasure in abandon, tarrying, tasting in abandonment in stepping and studying why we can’t.”

In Moten’s shaped prose what the mind knows the body must conceal and defy so that it can carry the mind to a place all its own. His poems are perfectly succinct and yet expanding of the edges to each box he dissects. His lyrical current moving the reader’s eye faster than than the brain can fully account. Each poem bears repeating, each chapter expands the rhythm of the one before it.

[hjh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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" (23)

"our salad is your/ touch extreme/ and braided fingers/ dressed in sugar/ through emulsion/ like a spur your/ final plural curve" (29)

"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" (32)

"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" (33)

"the tortured logic of our line and run keeps/ that in reserve for us, if we want it, but it's hard to want, it's so violent and beautiful" (57)

"it's a funny old sort of day./ it's a funny old kinda day./ there's no/ world./ selflessn/ ess, an organ/ waiting/ happily. the day/ swings" (73)

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Epigraph Poem
‘to frequent,
to gather,
to solemnize in joy,
to enjoy,
to sing praise,
to practice,
to assemble in disassembly,
to be quietly populous,
to publish intimately,
to repeat this often,
to josé esteban muñoz,
originally of the mass.’

from hand up to your ear
11 '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'

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fred Moten toys with language like Legos. He deconstructs and reconstructs the orthodoxy of syntax and, thus, meaning. He reinvents language and speaks his own dialect. All while engaging in the extensive anthropological exploration of Black intellectualism. Although enigmatic, it was a pleasure to read.

My favorite poems:

• hard enough to enjoy – a poem about a dance legend that embodies the black body's movement in politics, geography, and anatomy.
• mudede waters like josé munificent – a sensual poem which seems devoted to José Esteban Muñoz.
• the gramsci monument – an ode to what it means to be a part of, a product of, and the antithesis to the projects.

[Joel Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the rarest things- theory-heavy poetry that’s neither the work of a weak theorist writing bad poetry, nor a bad poet writing weak theory. Way into this.

[Michaela · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.75. Adore some of his word play. Not educated or hip enough to understand most of the rest. Tried to find some references but Google returned limited help.

[Madeline Augusta Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading this book is reading music

[Alyssa Uithoven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Moten’s work has a very good rhythm to it, but that was the only thing I enjoyed about this collection.

[Paul Cannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of poems that are a love story between Moten and his wife Laura.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the poem is about a song or album, listen to it while reading.

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's as if the ghost of Wittgenstein got together with that of John Coltrane for a serious slam/jam session to create a book/space that transcends printed shape in order to grace your ears and eyes with an explosive fusion of lexical fireworks and musical form...this book is about as "mak(ing) it new" as it gets.

[homoness · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trust the hype