The Service Porch

by Fred Moten

Poetry. African & African American Studies. The third and final volume of Fred Moten's poetic trilogy (including THE FEEL TRIO and The Little Edges), THE SERVICE PORCH is an expansive meditation on black life, love, violence, and the adventure of making art. National Book Award-Finalist, Moten returns here to reinvent some of his earliest poetic visions and strikes up a conversation with many of the most brilliant African American visual artists through a series of epistolary and ekphrastic poems. By turns mournful, tender, ferocious, and heart-breakingly honest, THE SERVICE PORCH is an open letter, a play list, and a hive of prayer and joy.

Genres: Poetry

140 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2016

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 4 out of 5]

he's almost too smart.

[Isai Soto]

Admittedly, I read the Contents page as a word association poem, and when I finished I said “Wow”. And sat back in my seat. It wasn’t until a third of the way into the book I realized it was a table of contents with all the poem titles.

[pumi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was really confused & then I was still confused but with a deepening texture. he makes me feel like I can afford to be way more playful with language. rewarding as fine shit

poetry is not a luxury !!

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

My head responded to a sweet music coming from new rooms, new realms, things I know nothing of, but want to.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"it's not that I want to say" / read & reread this poem & walked with it along the Niagara & sat down with it. moten's book has me excited about poetry again--how it engineers ethical thought in its music in ways that seem both elliptical and clear-sighted, dropping lines that invite long rumination -- "we have to pay for what our presence breaks--" gonna try to get some of these poems in my syllabus. & every time I read it, the poems reassemble in ways that make my notes just dots in space. so I'll have to let Ryan borrow it. & read more Moten.

[Ron Mohring]

I've tried picking this up a few times since I bought it last year, and I'm sorry to admit that I can't connect to it since obviously many other readers do. Maybe I'll try again in a few years and see if my ear is more developed for this sort of thing.

It's intriguing to try to follow the poems' structures on the page--at times I think they are representations of sound-- like echoes in an empty room, the language scattered across a largely empty page--but it's very hard for me to come away with anything more than curiosity about what's going on here. (My loss.)

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The utopian occasion of this set of sequences (one of them a revision of Moten's first book, Arkansas) is the Paul Goodman-recrudescent "sociality" of the service porch, or back porch (off the kitchen) to which the service worker attends (c.f., Fences), and here is one version of its inspirational verse [addressing itself to "Ian"]: "How you make abstractions out of representations of representational making. Look back at what you did, then step back a little bit and ask how you did it, then don't quite do it again." Donny Hathaway shows up with Michael Jackson -- that's one to ask the poet about. "My favorite things fight concertization."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

“... see that mouthfeel in my hand?”

[Noreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant, difficult, erudite, these are poems that somehow manage to be both deeply personal and broad in scope. Five or six of the poems are stunning, others workmanlike, a few incomprehensible. But Moten is always well worth the effort.

[Taylor Napolsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not tricky, but it is jostling and full of heart.