On the lower frequencies ...

Fred Moten, The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), 93 pp.—Moten’s third collection of poetry is an extension of the ideas and values not only in his Hughson’s Tavern (and to a lesser extent, in B. Jenkins) but also in Harmony Holiday’s Negro League Baseball and Erica Hunt’s penetrating, if overlooked, chapbook, a Day and its Approximates. The particular trajectory traced by Moten’s work reaches back to the fiction and, more important, essays of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, their mutual (though differently inflected) insistence on the “invisible” resources and resourcefulness that constitute Negro culture. In this regard, black culture, more or less the engine behind cultural nationalism, black power and the Black Arts Movement, is sometimes plagued by, for Moten, a kind of forgetting. However, perhaps because Holiday is younger than Moten, her work is more wistful, almost nostalgic, for the persistent, if dwindling possibilities, proffered by Black Arts. Moten’s most recent exploration of these ideas, The Feel Trio, is more defiant than his previous books and Holiday’s book, though that defiance may also be read as an oblique acknowledgement that African American culture, like black culture before it, is too plagued by a forgetting of its own history. At any rate, Moten’s book, like Holiday’s, deploys collage and stream of consciousness to insist on continuity across “brokenness,” here formalized in the large spaces between blocks of text, and thematized in the book’s first section as “Block Chapel” which, as in the bone-of-spirit inflections in Nathaniel Mackey’s work, links  “…a rocky/church with a club-bound feeling of/elbow.” Moten’s title, the name of the avant-garde jazz trio of Cecil Taylor, William Parker and Tony Oxley (I’m listening to their Berlin version of “Looking” as I write this), is significant insofar as it once again attempts to put the lie to the distinction between intellect and intuition, reason and emotion, at the foundation of Western humanism, those divides that justified its colonial adventures. However, like the novelist Charles Johnson, Moten is himself philosophically inclined, and so the Heideggerean echoes of the opening of the second section, “come on, get it,” are very much on point: “Performers feel each other differently,/ as material things that never happen,/ in persistent substance and their risen cities.” The impasse here, a different kind of blockage, rests on the thing/event, material/substance, distinctions, and so “even if there’s no escape, their training in certain clinical tendencies,/or in the general structure of being a problem,//because of the pivot they never disavowed/in thrown-ness, begins the world where we are fallen…” And though this state of having fallen is our “falling down together in an accident we dream,” the accident of race neither relieves the West of responsibility (“welcome to what we took from is the state.”) nor justifies “our” slavish commitments to race (not the same as a “free” commitment to culture). Nowhere does Moten make this more clear than near the end of the middle section: “I mean to make something else all the time./the harder you look inside/the easier it is to forget about gary. black youth has/always been a project of sonic youth in the/everyday distortion. we clear? sharper? my/plan is based on human nature, from tutu/to biko, with a continental burst in my/gig bag, which is keene-toed, sharp as a tack…” There isn’t enough space here to show how Moten’s deployment of Dasein revises Ellison’s and Murray’s “democratic’ and “vernacular” imperatives as the new “destitute imperative,” how this book, like his others, is written against forgetting, which is to say, written for a future that will have always been. The Feel Trio is a blunt, unsentimental (it is written against both pathology and apotheosis vis-à-vis Negro, black and African American cultures) survey of a commons that continues to thrive underground.