Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Please register here: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bgi_ZDqRQnuC6CAlOl2USA

Fred Moten will discuss a poem called "On Listening to the Two-Headed Lady Blow Her Horn," which is from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's extraordinary collection, The Gospel of Barbecue. He will try to talk - in the wake and under the influence of Manolo Callahan, J. Kameron Carter, Ruby Sales and Frank Stewart - about how the disruption of the metaphysics of sovereignty which the physics of the barbecue undertakes is held, and held open, and released in Jeffers's rich musicality. After failing properly to analyze a musicality that defies analysis, he will ask you to join him in trying to join Jeffers in the incalculable rhythm she lays down, which blurs the line between blur and blue, intoned time and pitch, in the interest of a general, insovereign insurgency.

Fred Moten teaches in the Department of Performance Studies in the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. His fields are black studies, poetics and critical theory and his special concern is the entanglement of social movement and aesthetic experiment. His latest book, written with Stefano Harney, is All Incomplete (Minor Compositions / Autonomedia, 2020).