Episode 121: Fred Moten and Ronaldo V. Wilson (part 2)
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In this two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Fred Moten about poetry as performance, influences and teachers, open field poetics, finding space for listeners and audience to feel welcome, how to define the limits—or lack thereof— of a book and, specifically, the performance they gave the night before at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church on May 24, 2023. Part one (ep 120) is a conversation about the performance. Part two (ep 121) is a recording of that performance.
This reading took place at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in New York City on May 24, 2023 and was recorded by the Poetry Project. (Audience audio was recorded on the same night and in the same location by Rachel Zucker.) Video of the READING at Poetry Project
Mixing and Mastering by Stephen Becker
In honor of this episode our charitable partner will donate $250 to Project South chosen by Fred Moten and to Fine Arts Work Center chosen by Ronaldo Wilson.
Many thanks to Laura Henriksen and everyone at the St Mark’s Poetry Project, to Fred Moten and Ronaldo V. Wilson and to S. Erin Batiste.
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RONALDO V. WILSON, PhD, poet, interdisciplinary artist, and academic, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; and Lucy 72. His latest books are Carmelina: Figures and Virgil Kills: Stories. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program; principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty member of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media).
Fred Moten’s latest projects are a poetry collection, Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (Wave Books), a record album, Fred Moten/Brandon López/Gerald Cleaver (Reading Group Records, 2022) and an essay collection, All Incomplete (Minor Compositions), co-authored with Stefano Harney, Xun Lee and Denise Ferreira da Silva. He is also the author of MANY other collections of poems and books of nonfiction including the consent not to be a single being trilogy of books published in 2017 and 2018 and A Poetics of the Undercommons published in 2016, all of which are mentioned in this episode and frequently mentioned with awe and love by many former Commonplace guests.
