Amiri Baraka’s poetry topic of March 31 Abrams talk

Poet Amiri Baraka’s writing often served as social criticism and drew attention to the systemic oppression of Black Americans. As part of a semester-long residency as M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor, poet and theorist Fred Moten will deliver a lecture on radical Black politics and the poetry of Baraka on Thursday, March 31 at 5 p.m. in the Kaufmann Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall.

Moten’s talk, “Nothing In the Way of Things,” will focus on Baraka’s poem “Something in the Way of Things (In Town)”; the Abrams lecture is presented by the Department of Literatures in English in the College of Arts & Sciences.

In  a  2017 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Moten said that “Baraka was at the convergence of all these things that I had been interested in: music, experimental literature, radical black politics, philosophy and literary theory — he was there for all of it, so he was the model for me.”

Moten is professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University. He has written several books of poetry and criticism, including “In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition”; “Hughson's Tavern”; “B. Jenkins”; “The Feel Trio”; “The Little Edges”; “The Service Porch”; “consent not to be a single being”; and “All That Beauty.” He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2020 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.

The March 31 lecture will be open to in-person attendance for members of the Cornell community (with Cornell ID). Anyone can livestream the lecture. Attendance guidelines are subject to change; visit english.cornell.edu/english-events for current guidelines and more information.

Moten is in residence at Cornell for the spring 2022 semester via the M.H. Abrams Visiting Professorship, which was established in 2006 by Stephen H. Weiss (’57) in honor of Meyer H. Abrams, Class of 1916 Professor, Emeritus. Moten has spent the semester exploring contemporary Black poetry with students enrolled in the two classes he is teaching at Cornell for the Department of Literatures in English: ENGL 4810 Advanced Poetry Writing and ENGL 6516 Songs of Experiment: Disruptions of Lyricism in Contemporary Anglophone Black Poetry.

Amanda Brockner is MFA Graduate Program Coordinator in the Department of Literatures in English