Fred Moten |
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With probing urgency,
Fred Moten engages a cultural lineage steeped in blues, R&B and improvisatory
music in search of "that other speech," "the old-new language,"
the one that will help us discover who and how and what we are--and what
"we" is. Arkansas is no one thing, no one place, rather a site
of dynamic intersections. It is at once personal and public, a quick,
razor-edged and open-ended conversation with multiple voicings. The work
reminds us that no vital sense of community can be separated from its
confustions and contentions and its ardents affirmations, just as no poetry
of worth can settle for the easy assuagements of the given. It reminds
us as well that in poetry the orial and the textural interweave to create
a new language, a personal grammar ("grammar of the outside")
illuminating the actual. Perhaps this is no more--and no less--than mimesis
in its true, radical, sense, the body at thought, now inside, now outside
the changes. Whitman termed it "the projective," while helping
us to found an American counter-tradition to which Moten and other are
presently adding welcome new dinemsions. |
