Dan Hodgson
on Fred Moten

 A Reach Beyond and Through

perennial fashion presence falling. Fred Moten. Seattle: Wave Books, 2023. 109. $20.

            There is nothing like the tickle of getting lost in a line of a Fred Moten poem composed of simple, matter-of-fact words placed in a logic that recurves into an illogic that is yet perfectly logical within the back-bending stanza. Except, maybe, the different tickle of getting lost in a line of a Fred Moten poem on a polysoteric, blended-compound of a word disrupting your progress, forcing you out of the poem and into a dictionary, philosophical essay, physics article or medical textbook only to come back into the poem progressed past where you thought possible—into a new possibility built upon and from your disrupted progress. If you read enough Moten, you’ll understand that the different tickles, which all lead you to a finding through losing, a rapture through rupture, are something of the point. Moten sees art as a lens to “see through to something else.[1]”  His newest poetry collection, perennial fashion presence falling (Wave Books 2023), questions art that doesn’t disrupt or allow for you to see through to other possible realities.

From the title to the fractured aesthetic of the physical book, perennial fashion presence falling meditates on the implied break between the perennial and the fashionable, between the fly and the fall—specifically, the break written about by Theodor Adorno in his essay “Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” in which Adorno slices into “fashionable” jazz by claiming: “the perennial sameness of jazz consists not in a basic organization of the material within which the imagination can roam freely and without inhibition, as within an articulated language, but rather in the utilization of certain well-defined tricks, formulas and cliches[2].” True to his (un)form, Moten’s defense of jazz and the fashionable is less a simple rebuke, but a twisting and pushing on the (il)logic and hypocrisy of Adorno through poems that poke at the deficiency inherent in his critique. The twisting starts with that very idea of “articulated language” as a place “imagination can roam freely” through poems that meditate upon roaming, freedom, blackness, black performance, temporality, objects, subjects, disruption, cuts, folds, music, art, artists, food, topography and a host of other familiar Moten themes in a language and poetics that challenge the idea of articulated language having the power to name and also be free or freeing.

The opening poem of the collection, “red sheaves,” frames what these pieces attempt:

let’s see what it’s like

to submit to no design,

undevoted to line breaks,

only come from being

broken, when we come

upon what comes up on us

from behind

The refusal of submission and the play upon the lexical—“broken”—and orthological—“upon” and “up on”—is less an act of rebellion, but more of an attempt to find “a structure of wind” or to see poetry like the “surfaces” later described in “red sheaves”:

whose shade and weave

refuse the mix of prior

separation? it’s not that

they’re not paintings;

it’s that in that they are

painting’s not what it is.

Moten is setting down challenges by claiming “reach beyond grasping / is what abstraction is supposed to give” and each of these poems is going to reach beyond where it /you can comfortably grasp. Moten sees value in the reach, sees the reach even as the point. For if Adorno trashes jazz and jazz fans for “participating in a confusion” that is directly leading to “the disintegration of culture and education,” Moten’s poetics say only in “disintegration,” or as this collection might call it “surfacing,” of what is known as “culture,” only in the falling / breaking apart, only in the “reach beyond grasping,” can “we get to / go through / someplace else,” which is the very place art needs to aspire if we are ever going to move from a culture built upon brutality. And, as if to answer every Adorno slam of  “the perennial sameness of jazz” or jazz improvisation as “mere frills,” Moten rearticulates lexical meaning to question the constructions we take for granted and show the true improvisational nature of meaning when we have the patience and practice to play with and at the edge of language:

and what about this

nonsensual semantic

phenomenon in which

the word “constant”

in the phrase “constant

structure” can only ever

mean to change?

All of the poems in this collection read “constant structure” as “change” and exemplify the staggeringly playful, but at times playfully brutal vision at the heart of Moten’s poetry: a want for “constant structure” is the moral heart that allow(ed) history’s brutalities.

            Just as much as Moten’s poetics play with, up, and up against traditional prosody, the dizzying and oftentimes epoch stretching allusions and references that animate many of these poems rub to “a nub” what we think of as literature’s allusiveness. The frequency and shorthand form they take seem to fall out of the poems—Fannie Lou Hamer will drop not far from Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones or next Fumi Okiji. But just as diverse as the references are Moten’s uses of them. Take for example, the ironic allusion to Jerry Maguire—"art had / me from hello”—in the poem “the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me.” Moten gets us thinking about the Tom Cruise vehicle only to subvert Maguire’s iconic line—“you… complete me”—with the question: “if I’m a / slave to art am I / a slave to love?” This not only turns on its head the Western Humanist, and now commercial, idea of love as a completion, but questions of what “moral law within” is that kind of art selling and how many millions have “settl[ed]” for it without every even knowing there is “this new way of / gathering that’s / not like that.” It is this wielding of a mosaic of thinkers, artists, ideas from different times and places, spanning the popular and the academic, the “high” and “low,” that makes Moten’s allusive point: there are artists, both perennial and fashionable, who are doing the work that allows us to see “a picture of / another world.”

            Much of perennial fashion presence falling challenges our propensity to see singular or want completeness where there is, always has been, and needs to be multiple. The poems’ tensions comb out the strands of the braids – “letting all the oneness/ plea and pli to numberless.” In the collection’s finale, “graves say, grave says,” Moten plays with this idea of singular and plural. He posits that in hearing a song one can’t help but hear all—the now and generational—that goes into the song: “the heartbeat of the beaten to death can’t be unheard in the music.” If as Adorno claimed that “no piece of jazz can, in a musical sense, said to have a history” or that “perennial fashion becomes the likeness of a planned congealed society,” Moten counters that “you [Adorno] have but mistook us all.” The poem goes on to say, “Perennial fashion / is fly / in the open diary,” calling it a “tentacular message”—quite the fly antonym to “congealed.” The “open diary” reaches back to the opening lines of the collection—"we’re walking / an open diary”—but, now, by the end, instead of just “walking” perennial fashion is the “fly” or the levitated or the fashionable that spreads out the many tentacled messages within each and every action or act of art to those who are willing to look through or listen for that different world. The “fly” here becomes the particulars of life that seem locked up in the finite, in the perennially singular, but when shaken by abstraction fall free into the many. And by this “presence falling,” Moten’s work allows us to see through the accepted notion that art is singular or part of “an education”  or “culture” that is or has ever been complete to an art that, instead, must perennially resurface/ confuse/ break in order to show how we can possibly be a culture that truly “fellowship[s] in / abolition.”

[1] Belladonna Collaborative. “Simone White and Fred Moten Audience Discussion,” March 16, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhW8hLyp1Dk.

[2] Adorno, Theodor W. “Perennial Fashion – Jazz.” Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. MIT Press, 1981.