in the color field there’sblood at the root. ourschedule is everydaysunshine blood, everydead nigger on the streetin every record spinningaround, every last onewhirling. that’s whatevery record recordsin the blue they see.which one of youmotherfuckers can seeand can’t see that? blackarts vs. black abstractionis a lie again and again,like you get not to seeall that brutality in allthat blue. you don’t getto not see, motherfucker,but what happens when youact like you do? somebodyblack and poor can’tbreathe, everybody dyingof their dying breath,nobody laying with themon the ground, all of usall fucked up with ourphantom child, andyou get to act like youalive in a brutal gallery?
color field
Fred Moten
Feature Date
- April 22, 2023
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Brian Teare
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“color field” from perennial fashion presence falling, copyright 2023 by Fred Moten.
Used with permission of the author and Wave Books.
Fred Moten works in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent poetry book is perennial fashion presence falling (Wave Books, 2023).
“...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.
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