An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey

Abstract

Born in Miami in 1947, Nathaniel Mackey grew up in Southern California. He attended Princeton and then Stanford, where he earned a Ph.D. in literature. In the late 1970s, after having taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and USC, Mackey joined the faculty of UC-Santa Cruz, where he works today. His first poetry publications were chapbooks, all of which were eventually collected in Eroding Witness, published in 1985.' In this book, Mackey introduced the two poetic series that he has since continued to expand: of the (number 31 of which appeared in CR 41:4) and mu. Bedouin Hornbook followed in 1986. This was the first installment of Mackey's serial fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. No further books appeared, however, until 1993, which saw the publication of no fewer than four. These were of Udhra, a book of poetry; Djbot Baghostus's Run, the second installment of From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate; a collection of his critical writings entitled Discrepant Engagement; and Moment's Notice, an anthology of jazz writings he edited with Art Lange. Most recently, he issued a compact disc called Strick: Song of the 16-25 (1995), on which he reads his poetry to the musical improvisations of Royal Hartigan and Hafez Modirzadeh. He is currently at work on another collection of poetry, whose parts, entitled Strick and Stra, continue the of the Andoumboulou through number 35; and he has completed Atet A.D., the third installment of From a Broken Bottle, which Sun & Moon will soon issue in its entirety as part of its New American Fiction series. He also edits the literary magazine, Hambone. Mackey's creative work therefore consists of three ongoing serial projects, each with many literary and cultural sources. [MJu (a title taken from trumpeter Don Cherry's same-named series) incorporates themes from Egyptian myth and American jazz into staccato lines that are punctured with ellipses; the work is delivered in a kind of vatic scat, as Mackey says in the poem, Slipped Quadrant. of the Andoumboulou draws on flamenco, the deities of Haitian voudoun, a school of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry (the School of Udhra), reggae, and West African lore to explore human longing for what is unobtainable-but which nonetheless persists in culture. Mackey's serial fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, consists of letters written by N., multi-instrumentalist in the Mystic Horn Society, to the Angel of Dust. The letters are sometimes hallucinatory accounts of improvisations, sometimes hypnogogically clear descriptions of actual performances, and sometimes virtual lectures on musical ideas. Ironically, Mackey himself has taken to quoting N. as an authority in his own academic writings. Two of the most recent letters follow the interview. Mackey read from his work at the University of Chicago on Friday, May 17, 1996. The following interview took place Saturday, May 18. Peter O'Leary: You've written critically about Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Black Mountain poets, Caribbean writers, you've written about Amiri Baraka. There's a way in which someone coming upon this might think that these were just discrete areas of your interest, but I have a sense that they are part of a synthetic periscoping in which you're taking in an imagined or envisioned whole. I'm wondering, then, if this is the case. I wonder how you relate to this eclecticism. It's not discrete, is it? Nathaniel Mackey: All of those things that I've written about are things that have made an enormous impact on me. They just spoke to me in some way that was very compelling and that went very deep and that made me want to stay with them more, read farther into them, go farther into them. I find that that doesn't happen with everything; it doesn't happen with many things. Now, what that impact is and what they have in common to have achieved it, I don't know if I can say. …