American poet, cultural theorist, and scholar, Fred Moten reads from his latest publication perennial fashion presence falling (Wave Books, 2023) in connection with his 2023 FORART Lecture in Oslo. Free and open for all! 

Fred Moten 
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. Read more on Wave Books.

On Fred Moten  
Fred Moten is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside. His scholarly texts include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (co-authored with Stefano Harney, 2013), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) as well as Black and Blur, Stolen Life and The Universal Machine  – the three volumes of his Consent to Not Be a Single Being series (2017-18). All Incomplete, again co-written with Stefano Harney, appeared in 2021. 

Moten has published numerous poetry collections, including The Little Edges, The Feel Trio, B Jenkins, and Hughson’s Tavern. In 2020, Moten was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for “creating new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life.” 

The day before the reading Fred Moten is giving the 2023 FORART Lecture at Litteraturhuset, Friday September 1, 18:00. 

About FORART 
FORART is an independent foundation established in 1989 to support research projects within contemporary art. FORART focuses on new phenomena within this genre and is involved in interdisciplinary research. Recent FORART lecturers include Julia Bryan-Wilson, Liam Young, Whitney Davis, Darby English, Sianne Ngai, Tom Eccles, Hal Foster, Molly Nesbit, Arthur C. Danto. and Daniel Birnbaum among others. Read more on forart.no