Sounding Out: Nathaniel Mackey's Ontological Archive in Fugitive Run

Abstract

Sounding Out:Nathaniel Mackey's Ontological Archive in Fugitive Run Robin Tremblay-McGaw (bio) Stridewas our true country, native ground Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem In the early seventies Nathaniel Mackey was a doctoral student at Stanford University working on his dissertation Call Me Tantra: Open Field Poetics as Muse, his poetics developing temporally and geographically within the San Francisco Bay Area during the emergence of Language writing and New Narrative. Mackey has described his relationship to the Bay thusly: "It was in the larger Bay Area that my earliest bondings with people on the basis of being an aspiring writer took any significant form. […] It was really my trips to San Francisco and the East Bay that were most formative" (qtd. in Rosenthal 164), introducing Mackey not only to numerous writers but also to musicians such as Cecil Taylor. Language Writer Ron Silliman included Mackey in his selection of eight experimental poets in the Socialist Review in 1988, a group Silliman introduced by asserting that these writers have distinct audiences and readers while also suggesting that, for some, their relationship to literary experimentation, particularly vis-à-vis formal innovations and the construction or deconstruction of the subject, is "more conventional." Silliman did this by setting up a dichotomy between the "subjects of history" who are largely white, heterosexual males [End Page 326] and others who have been history's objects—women, people of color, lesbians, and gays ("Poetry" 63). While tending to stay outside of the "turf wars going on" in the Bay Area (qtd. in Rosenthal 165), Mackey addressed and responded to facets of these contestations, including Silliman's reductive assertions about who writes and reads what. Mackey's critique is incisive and razor sharp: "the distinction between a formally innovative willingness to incur difficulty, on the white hand, and a simple disclosure of innovative content, on the black, is a simple or simplistic one, but telling nonetheless" (Paracritical Hinge 241). Mackey's work troubles and exposes the distinctions framed by uncritical whiteness. This essay locates Mackey's work within the context of the San Francisco Bay Area writing ecologies and contestations, between the emergence of Language Writing and the parataxis of the New Sentence and the set of performative, narrative, and other practices elaborated by gay and lesbian New Narrative writers. I argue that Mackey improvises a unique and asymptotic course through these and many other territories; in fact, his poetics resists an American romance with place and identity, conjuring instead an ensembled present and possible future (not without 'rub') by way of an ontological archive in "fugitive run," a phrase I am deriving from Mackey's myriad and dynamic invocations of each individual word. Mackey's texts and we, his readers, are headed out far beyond the borders of the US and Europe, where western categorical fantasies of sovereign subjectivity are left for elsewhere, nowhere, everywhere (Paracritical Hinge 212). San Francisco Bay Area Writing Contestations In one origin story of the San Francisco Bay Area 'poetry wars' of the late twentieth-century, Robert Duncan is a pivotal and provocative point of reference. On an evening in 1983 when a young Language Writer, Barrett Watten, gave a talk on Louis Zukofsky's "A," maestro of ceremonies, sixty-year-old Robert Duncan, offered an alternate reading. The event has since been mythologized. More useful than the hyperbole around it is perhaps the way it makes clear some of the contemporary contestations about poetics: the methods, goals, theories, and aspirations for reading and writing practices. In the 1980s in the Bay Area, deeply suspicious of narrative, Language Writers rejected Duncan's reverence for the mythic, the personal, [End Page 327] and the emotive, while New Narrative writers, particularly Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, found in Duncan a source of permission for feeling, for the value of the "made-up" as a source of depth and as a means for wrestling with the urgent question, particularly for gay and lesbian writers, "what kind of representation least deforms its subject?" (Glück, "Long Note" 18). Duncan is a significant figure for Nathaniel Mackey too, in part because of Duncan's refusal of prevailing orthodoxies and prescriptive and delimiting parameters around what...