B Jenkins

B Jenkins

  • Author: Moten, Fred; McGovern, Charles; Kun, Josh
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • Serie: Refiguring American Music
  • ISBN: 9780822346845
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822392675
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2010
  • Month: January
  • Pages: 124
  • DDC: 811/.6
  • Language: English
The fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten, B Jenkins is named after the poet’s mother, who passed away in 2000. It is both an elegy and an inquiry into many of the themes that Moten has explored throughout his career: language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical aesthetic and political tradition. In Moten’s verse, the arts, scholarship, and activism intertwine. Cadences echo from his mother’s Arkansas home through African American history and avant-garde jazz riffs. Formal innovations suggest the ways that words, sounds, and music give way to one another.

The first and last poems in the collection are explicitly devoted to Moten’s mother; the others relate more obliquely to her life and legacy. They invoke performers, writers, artists, and thinkers including not only James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, Charlie Parker, and Cecil Taylor, but also contemporary scholars of race, affect, and queer theory. The book concludes with an interview conducted by Charles Henry Rowell, the editor of the journal Callaloo. Rowell elicits Moten’s thoughts on the relation of his poetry to theory, music, and African American vernacular culture.

  • contents
  • b jenkins
  • gayl jones
  • billie holiday/roland barthes
  • wanda jean allen/kendall thomas
  • jeanne moreau/miles davis
  • charlie jenkins
  • james brown
  • henry dumas
  • fishbone/joseph jarman
  • elvin jones, malachi favors, steve lacy
  • alexander weheliye, lygia clark, ed roberson
  • sherrie tucker, francis ponge, sun ra
  • gary fisher
  • yopie prins
  • robert farris thompson
  • brent edwards
  • bessie smith
  • jean-michel basquiat
  • alice key
  • james baldwin
  • william parker/fred mcdowell
  • cecil taylor/almeida ragland
  • tony oxley/frederick douglass
  • walter benjamin/julian boyd
  • peck curtis
  • john thompson
  • george gervin/michael fried
  • adrian piper
  • josé muñoz
  • michael hanchard/woody guthrie
  • thelma foote/lindon barrett
  • elizabeth cotten/nahum chandler
  • ann cvetkovich/kathleen stewart
  • frank ramsay/nancy wilson
  • arthur jafa and greg tate
  • joe torra
  • piet mondrian
  • nathaniel mackey
  • marie jenkins
  • q. b. bush
  • sleater-kinney
  • eric dolphy
  • general baker
  • johnny cash/rosetta tharp
  • pam grier
  • bobby bland
  • la niña de los peines
  • laura harris
  • betty carter
  • william corbett
  • june jordan
  • murray jackson
  • curtis mayfield
  • carrie tirado bremen
  • margaret walker/audre lorde
  • audre lorde/kara keeling
  • chrisshonna grant/victor feldman
  • toni morrison/renee gladman
  • njeeri wa ngugi
  • john work
  • barbara lee
  • mike davis and glynda white
  • charlie parker
  • birdia mott
  • julian djibril
  • lorenzo bird
  • fred hopkins
  • b jenkins
  • words don’t go there, an interview conducted by charles rowell

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