I think I tend to be [...] an advocate for the invisible. The reason I write poetry rather than fiction is because I don't want to talk about the homicide that's going on in the middle of the room, I want to talk about the dust bunnies underneath the table, because they're what's not seen. So much of the world is not seen, is not acknowledged. And I grew up in a family that for reasons of religion and history and family dynamics, I had a grandfather whose first demand of his grandchildren was that we be invisible so I have a lot of solidarity with dust bunnies and with the gunk underneath my fingernails and the stuff that sort of forms a filter on the windowsill and I really do want to call attention to that over and over again as much as I humanly can because I think of it as being unbelievably important to our lives and our souls, but the only way to get to it is through poetry.
- Ron Silliman at the UCSD New Writing Series: Podcast Available Here
What if the homicide is not in the middle of the room?
The majority of homicides are not in the middle of the room.
Only a rare homicide is in the middle of the room.
Only the rarest of homicides is in the middle of the room.
One lies to say the homicide is in the middle of the room.
One body lies; the homicide is in the middle of the room.
The dust bunnies emerge to dance.
The gunk under my fingernails is still there.
The filter on the windowsill.
And the body was never in the center of the room.
And the body was quickly removed from the center of the room.
I mean this might sound really maniacal or something but I'm not I think there is a sense in which I have to claim Kant as an ancestor but only insofar as the way that that relationship would work is if in the end it would turn out that I'm his ancestor. It seems to me that first of all the Kantian construction of race is important for us to know something about precisely because it is bound up with the very constitution of the modern subject. [...] That moment where one can really see the convergence of the eruption of a theory of modern subjectivity, the emergence of a discourse on race and the emergence of a certain discourse on the aesthetic: that convergence is a fateful moment and I think it's worth paying some attention to.
- Fred Moten in Black Kant (Pronounced Chant): A Theorizing Lecture at the Kelly Writers House, February 27, 2007: Podcast Available Here
And then I read Samuel Delaney's The Motion of Light in Water. How to chart the progressions, how to make room for change, how to recognize anxiety. How to have a nervous breakdown.
Something about all of these men together clashing up against each other.
- Ron Silliman at the UCSD New Writing Series: Podcast Available Here
What if the homicide is not in the middle of the room?
The majority of homicides are not in the middle of the room.
Only a rare homicide is in the middle of the room.
Only the rarest of homicides is in the middle of the room.
One lies to say the homicide is in the middle of the room.
One body lies; the homicide is in the middle of the room.
The dust bunnies emerge to dance.
The gunk under my fingernails is still there.
The filter on the windowsill.
And the body was never in the center of the room.
And the body was quickly removed from the center of the room.
I mean this might sound really maniacal or something but I'm not I think there is a sense in which I have to claim Kant as an ancestor but only insofar as the way that that relationship would work is if in the end it would turn out that I'm his ancestor. It seems to me that first of all the Kantian construction of race is important for us to know something about precisely because it is bound up with the very constitution of the modern subject. [...] That moment where one can really see the convergence of the eruption of a theory of modern subjectivity, the emergence of a discourse on race and the emergence of a certain discourse on the aesthetic: that convergence is a fateful moment and I think it's worth paying some attention to.
- Fred Moten in Black Kant (Pronounced Chant): A Theorizing Lecture at the Kelly Writers House, February 27, 2007: Podcast Available Here
And then I read Samuel Delaney's The Motion of Light in Water. How to chart the progressions, how to make room for change, how to recognize anxiety. How to have a nervous breakdown.
Something about all of these men together clashing up against each other.