November 15, 2007: Nathaniel Mackey



EVENT INTRODUCTION

Nathaniel Mackey is a poet, novelist, and a literary critic. He’s written several volumes of poetry, including Whatsaid Serif, School of Udhra and Splay Anthem which won the 2006 National Book Award for poetry, four novels that comprise the first tetrad of his ongoing fiction From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the fourth in the series, Bass Cathedral, is coming out from New Directions this January. I should refrain from calling the four volumes a tetraology, knowing the epistolary nature of this “work” that never forecloses on the possibility of another volume, of even one more letter. Mackey has also written books of literary criticism, such as the recent Paracritical Hinge, as well as Discrepant Engagement which, while oft-cited in Poetics circles, has also lately engendered essays exploring the problems of identity and alterity politics.

Mackey’s poetry, fiction, indeed his criticism, transect issues of cross-culturality and experimental writing. His work ranges across continents, revives myths and rituals and infuses what might still be called Western culture with alternate traditions. What we find when Mackey takes us on pilgrimages all over the world—to the Caribbean, to Andalusia, to North Africa--tracing a song from Mississippi Delta Blues to Coltrane’s Jazz, to the African roots of Cuban music, to Andalusian flamenco, reaching so far as a love song from Luristan in Iran—what we find is that cultures mix, that poetries, musics and rituals mix, that art and culture have seemingly always done so.

Mackey’s work also opens a vein of inquiry into a type of writing that not only impacts the social and political, but also celebrates dissonance, the disjunctive gap between writing and socio-cultural phenomena. Indeed, as the keynote speaker at the Guelph Jazz Festival in 1999, Mackey was asked to present on the conference themes—collaboration and dissonance—themes which the festival organizers derived from Mackey’s critical essays. For his keynote address, Mackey read fiction out of a desire, as he put it, to have fiction “sit in” and collaborate with the Festival’s expected critical and analytical discourse. From a Broken Bottle’s genesis is its hybridity of genre, he notes, “its desire to permit flow between disparate modes of articulation.” As Mackey mentions elsewhere, his fiction “wavers with regard to genre, by turns an alternate, fictional voice pursued by criticism and an alternate critical voice pursued by fiction; emerging as well from a serial poem, Song of the Andoumboulou.”

Within this so-called “alternate voice,” within the synesthetic serenade of Mackey’s writing, we’re transported by an exuberance for language that spins off the page, into "thought bubbles" that emanate from musical instruments, into the ecstasy of sensing we’re inside and outside language at the same time. We’re placed in the same position as Jarred Bottle in Mackey’s novel Djbot Baghostus’s Run, Bottle who, while sitting in his car at an intersection, is admonished by a police officer who informs him, “You’re sitting at a green light.” Bottle’s reply to the officer—“So what?”—lands him in jail, and there he begins an exposition, a lecture/libretto, an operatic defense that contests the law. As Bottle reflects: “The theoretically inclined would argue that being held by police for questioning wasn’t the same as being invited to give a speech. Those who were less inclined to split hairs, however, knew that under the circumstances to speak and to sing were the same. This was what being in jail was about.”

It is important to also note that Mackey’s writing is passionately engaged with music. In his work, readers take wing with a writing that curves toward improvisation, echoing the call and response of Jazz, groping toward lines of flight and escape away from repetition: a writing that’s more iterative and performative than it is substantive. Among disparate modes of articulation there is, for Mackey, “the vexed question of translatability between music and writing.” Indeed, for those here tonight unfamiliar with Mackey’s fiction, there is no other American writing today that comes closer to making this elusive translation of sound to symbol and sentiment. We are asked to listen, to hear with all our senses and our intuition, to open ourselves to heterodox language—the only question being one of access. How can we access this music, this prose, with all our senses? Mackey’s writing leads us down that path with the question, “What about Lilac Time?” Overcome by the smell of lilacs, the narrator N. in Atet AD describes the moment—the wafting in of the lilac scent—as originating from “some abrupt, immediately suspect source…from a swift, flat angle through which the lilac scent made its way… the sound of this lilac scent came loud and clear, entering at exactly the same swift, flat angle the smell of lilacs took. Smell, touch, hearing were rolled into one.”

Imagine a mode of reading and listening where this is possible, where we refuse to unravel the snarl between physical sensation and abstract impression, refuse to make space between the felt and the imagined. Mackey’s prose, like music, is arranged at the root of impulse, at desire, a tendency toward flight, or in Miles Davis’s words, “space breathing though music.”

In a critical piece, Mackey describes how the musician Charles Lloyd, when asked to comment on his music during a radio interview, replied, “Words don’t go there.” Mackey writes in response that “Writers influenced by Jazz have risen up to the challenge to prove him wrong.” This challenge is eventually met with a proscription—which appears several years later in Atet A.D. when N. reflects: “Words may not go there, but I’m convinced they do come from there.”

 

Reviews:


“Bedouin Hornbook struck me as the most moving and intelligent fiction about modern jazz I’d ever read.”
— Greg Tate, The Village Voice

“...Mackey's series of improvisatory jazz-inspired fictions locates a ground between invention and listening that he defines as the source of culture itself. All culture, for Mackey, is a form of listening to what "we" are collectively improvising.”
— Barret Watten

“Splay Anthem is driven with rhythm, hard with motion, languid with sex. Mackey crafts a new kind of stanza, whose words are at once beautifully contained in their symmetry and bursting at the edges.”
— Chantal James

BIO
A major American poet and novelist,
NATHANIEL MACKEY
is the 2006 recipient of a National Book Award for his poetry collection, Splay Anthem, which The Library Journal also chose as one of the 10 Best Poetry Books for that year.

Mackey’s books of poetry include Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006); Whatsaid Serif (1998); Song of the Andoumboulou: 18-20 (1994); School of Udhra (1993); Outlantish (1992); Eroding Witness (1985), which was selected for the National Poetry Series; Septet for the End of Time (1983); and Four for Trane (1978).

He is also the author of an ongoing serial novel, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, of which three volumes have been published: Atet A.D. (2001), Djbot Baghostus's Run (1993), and Bedouin Hornbook (1986). The fourth, Bass Cathedral, is due out in the Spring of 2008.

The poet Robin Blaser has called Mackey's work "a brilliant renewal of and experiment with the language of our spiritual condition and a measure of what poetry gives in trust—'heart's/meat' and the rush of language to bear it."

Also a critic and literary theorist, Mackey is the author of Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993) as well as Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (2005). He is the editor of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (2000, with Carolyn Kizer, John Hollander, Robert Hass, and Marjorie Perloff) and Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (1993, with Art Lange). In 1995, Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment, was released.

Mackey has also been the editor of the literary journal Hambone for 30 years. His longtime radio program on Santa Cruz public radio station KUSP, "Tanganyika Strut," continues to spotlight African music throughout the world.

A Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Nathaniel Mackey is currently also a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

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