Fred Moten in conversation with Douglas Kearney
City Lights celebrates the publication of
perennial fashion presence falling, by Fred Moten, published by Wave Books
“…some ekphrastic evening, this’ll be both criticism and poetry and failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between.”
So writes poet, critic, theorist, and MacArthur fellow Fred Moten in his latest poetry collection perennial fashion presence falling. Much like the poems found in The Feel Trio (Letter Machine 2014), which was a National Book Award finalist, and All That Beauty (Letter Machine, 2019), the poems here present Moten’s “shaped prose” on the page and the dizzying brilliance of both polyphonies and paronomasia. Within this collection, the poems hold an innate quantum curiosity about the infinitude of the present and the ways in which one could observe the history of the future. Poems beget poems, overflowing and flowering, urging deeper etymological investigations. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten approaches the sublime, relishing that intermediary space of microtonal thought.
Fred Moten works in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. He is concerned with social movement, aesthetic experiment and black study and has written a number of books of poetry and criticism, the latest of which, written with Stefano Harney, is All Incomplete (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2021). In addition to his long-term collaboration with Harney, Moten is engaged in ongoing work with critic Laura Harris, artist Wu Tsang and musicians Gerald Cleaver and Brandon López. Moten is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Douglas Kearney has published seven poetry collections, including Sho (Wave, 2021), which won the Griffin Poetry Award and the Minnesota Book Award, and which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Most recently, he published Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022), a Bagley Wright Lecture Series book. He is also the author of Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and the California Book Award silver medal for poetry. M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up.” Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and lives in St. Paul with his family.
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/