Andoumboulou 17 &18

[This is a continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou, a series of poems that Mackey has been working on through three books. His latest book with Andoumboulou poems in them, Splay Anthem, won the National Book Award. I take into consideration his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it (and I sincerely hope you do), many of the poems can be found here. Also, Mackey reads 10 of the poems with musical accompaniment on an album entitled Strick.]

Yesterday I reflected on how seemingly incoherent Andoumboulou 17 becomes given the extraordinary slipperiness of the pronouns. After further consideration, I think that the poem is best seen as a kind of bridge between 16 and 18. Mackey himself discusses in one of his interviews how he wants the poems to echo and suggest each other. If 17 is not able to stand alone, to what extent is it best not to approach it that way?

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On to #18

Allusions / definitions:

ogou en dez o — Ogou is a voodoun god of blacksmithing, war, leadership, and water. "en dez o" means that he is of two waters: Petro and Rada, two different classifications of Voodoun deities (I think.) Petro are given libations of fire, Rada of water. Therefore, ogou can also be seen as a mediator of severe difference.

Davidic Harp

Monophysite — Emphasize Christ as singularly divine rather than human and divine, as was the Catholic position for centuries.

Oudada — Title of a song on the b-side of a French 78 from 1937. The A side is "C'est tout le contraire." Megan Simpson in her article "Trickster Poetics: Multiculturalism and Collectivity in Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou" (Melus vol.28, 2003) claims that Mackey invented the term. I don't know what to believe.

inveiglement — To win over by flattery and wiles

obliquity — deviation from moral rectitude; an obscure or confusing statement

abstruse — difficult to comprehend

ta'wil — There are assorted definitions for this word, all pertaining to the interpretation of Islamic sacred books. The one that would seem the most salient, relative to Mackey's interest in the Gnostics, is one that believes a hidden meaning subsists beneath any seemingly literal one.

Ogun's iron shoe —I can't find anything more particular for this other than that Ogun is the god of iron.

martinete — "(From martillo, hammer, or martinete – an instrument with which to strike red-hot metals in the forge to give them the required shape). In literary terms, the toná proceeds from gypsy ballads, and it is considered the oldest flamenco cante (style of song). Martinetes, carceleras and debla are varieties of tonás that can be distinguished from one another by the themes of their lyrics, and whose characteristic trait is that they don´t have any guitar accompaniment. The martinete has a strong dramatic impact. Its interpretation as a dance form is relatively recent. It was Antonio Ruiz Soler who incorporated it into his repertoire in the late 1950s. "

saeta — "The saeta is an unaccompanied song stemming from Jewish religious songs which are believed to date back to the 16th century. The singer will show his ardent devotion to a particular image of Christ or the Virgin during its performance and to witness an ancient saeta performed from a balcony in a narrow back street is an experience that you will leave you emotionless." -- Tony Bryant

In number 18 Mackey actually uses the phrase "opaque pronouns"! Given my interest in his pronouns, I find this, uh, interesting.

This poem is much more coherent than the previous one, even as it picks up and furthers considerations, explorations, and tropes from earlier in Whatsaid Serif. It begins with the speaker sitting in the Long Night Lounge and having a man, described as a "Gnostic stranger," sit down beside him and repeat the word "so" over and over again. It ends by mentioning two inebriates, presumably the two men at the bar, now drunk.

The bar is full of paradox, "a cramped, capacious room"; as is the stranger. The speaker "embraces him as though it was me I embraced."

Again, as in the previous several poems, boundaries between people are permeable: where does the speaker end and the stranger begin?Are they the same person? Presumably, at least on some level. A "Gnostic" stranger, it seems, could only be a mystery squared, a stranger that is other than his literal strangeness: no chance to get him.

Next, Mackey breaks off to discuss an awakening from sleep (literal? probably not — we're in Gnostic territory.) Awakened by "flamenco's gnostic moan" — which leads to confusion and disorientation: "sank, felt nothing," "spun words rocked," "shook me," "spun." He ends this stanza by refering to sounds: "Davidic harp" (of the ancient Hebrews), "Ethiopian moan," Monophysite lament." Given that the monophysites were and are associated with Egypt, Mackey in one part of one stanza brings together the Hebraic and two different African traditions.

Then he ends with the pronouns: "one we...that we would include, not reduce to us." This seems to represent an effort to not erase cultural difference during cultural contact. "'persons' whether or notd we / knew who they were." Human beings outside our cultural purview remain persons whether or not we can come to terms with who they are.

Mackey is insisting on accepting skepticism and epistemological limits. I feel safe to say that the tentative, searching, Gnostic feel to this poem has to do with the tentative reaching toward culture and cultures. Unlike some of the earlier Andoumboulou poems, where I worried about Mackey overwhelming his subject matter with the frame of Western anthropology, here I see him confronting this abyss head on.

The next stanza again sharply shifts its focus. Now, it delves into on an old romantic affair" "'Was it a woman / he once was in love with?'" "'Was it a lie / he'd long since put it all behind?'"

I am fascinated by these lines since this stanza's obsession with the 'deep' answers about this old love affair must be plumbed, but answers are difficult to come by. All we end with is fire and ears, "ears hot / with what she took to be talk not of / her but of someone else." Feelings are in flames and obsolete.

Mackey breaks these three stanzas off from the rest of the poem with the use of a dot separating them. These three stanzas explore skepticism in three different arenas: the setting of the bar with its permeability and mutability; the cross-cultural 'dream' about various musics and our ability to understand them, especially given Gnosticism's constant warning that whatever it is, it means something else; finally, we have a painful obsession about an old love affair, up in flames, because of the inability to hear, to make ears work correctly.

Skepticism. The necessity of it. The pain of it. The confusion.

The skepticism continues in the next stanza, with Mackey writing that where words point is "not beside the point though almost." What do we have if not words? Mackey also negates "we": the we of romance, of nation, of collectivity. "Rethought what Andoumboulou / meant."

The next stanza seems to be just this rethinking. We have a "squat world," a "failed creation" — which links the Andoumboulou with the Gnostics. Perhaps words and meaning can be found in the very travail of the search, "voice / borne up by what ailed it."

But it doesn't end there. By the end of the stanza words and voices are connected to blood and obliquity.

In the next stanza we again see an attempt to work out of the despair of extreme skepticism and isolation: "Revelled in what once we lamented." While "the dense woods mocked us," "we imagined we rode, running / in place." I don't know what sort of consolation this is, but it seems something. This is a groping, searching, popping poem engaging the intangibles of the most nuanced and subtle differences, which make all the difference.

Mackey now makes a big break in the poem, beginning it again about halfway down the next page underneath a horizontal line. Here, we seem alienated from music itself: "strummed / harp long ago let go." Only a marinete sings to drummed accompaniement, but "wasted breath, wind battling / wind."

We now have another long break ending with a horizontal line. This time, the entire two stanzas seem to sustain some sort of affirmation, however blunted: "Sound / raveling sound calling itself / eternity." He describes hearing a song whose "head had been / chipped / from stone." Also, a ghost is inside skin.

The secret is Gnostic, is inside, beyond and behind the literal: inside the stone, inside the skin.

The poem ends with Ogun of Two Waters meeting the speaker in his sleep and awkening "me to my slumber." Do we ever not slumber? Is it a matter of alternate slumbers, some being less sticky, offering more insight than others?

We end with two images: one baffles me, it describes a knife in trenchwater. The second is a repeated image that we saw earlier in this poem: "Stone / hoisted on / stone." We have just seen that with the right chip, song comes from stone. It does contain life, if we proceed with care and caution.

And stone can be hoisted on stone. We can build, even though we can never fully 'know' a stone. To do so would be to chip it to nothing. But we can know the chips, the glintings, some of the waters and flames that are there.

For the first time in this series, Mackey seems to be fully addressing the cross-cultural difficulties his poems raise, and the aesthetic and intellectual (and perhaps personal?) stakes go much higher. These types of poems are what drew me to this series in the first place, and this careful reading of them is only increasing my appreciation.

We are in the set of poems Mackey calls 'strick' — any of the bast fibers made ready to be drawn into a continuous strand of loose wool, flax, or cotton, ready for drawing and twisting.

These poems are the fibers, that can later be twisted together.

Andoumboulou 17 (continued)

[This is a continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou from various angles that interest me. I take into consideration his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it, many of the poems can be found here.]

The images in the next several stanzas, which are set off from the first couple by a skipped line and a dot, pertain to lakes and rumbling trains.

It would seem that a 'he' and a 'she' spend time at a "Lake they were soon to / leave," then she sees "The he she remebers not/ the he she saw stepping onto" a train.

We finish with another image of drowning: "Water up to our necks."

There are also plenty images of pulling apart, roughness, rockiness, spun, and whooshing. I think this last word, which is repeated several times, has to do with "a wind which wasn't a wind."

These characters do not seem happy about the separation. It is almost like the cutting of twins, a hollowing out, "the Andoumboulou beckoned."

The Andoumboulou live inside the earth and are a "rough draft," as Mackey refers to them, of humanity. With all the images of drowning and going beneath the earth, Mackey is transforming this split between this he and she into an emblem of the connectedness and whoosh disconnectedness of people to one another and to the earth.

Before a long, page length break in the poem which ends with a horizontal line, the "he" pockets a rock. After the line a blacksmith or someone working with blacksmith tools tries to turn the rock into a point. Finally, the "he" is knocked across the head and told not to let tools touch one another.

In the end he may die by choking on a kola nut.

But how can we be sure? This is a poem of such radically fluid identities that we cannot say anything about the characters with any confidence. Their fluidity may even put them beyond death or beyond our ability to see their death.

Instead, we have the verbs: whoosh, drown, pulled under, choked, rumble, and so on.

The poem seems to chronicle the specific ways people get buffeted into having multiple identities. They are so singular.

Such a poem risks incoherence: pronouns that are attached to no noun are then displaced by memory or other pronouns.

I have not decided yet, but this may be an instance where Mackey goes too far in exploring these issues of fluidity. Do we readers need some sort of solidity, however, impermanent, to stand on?

I am still thinking.

Andoumboulou 17 -- Continuation from June 10

[This is a continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou from various angles that interest me. I take into consideration his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it, many of the poems can be found here.]

In the second stanza we again run into 'rocks', this time as a weight pulling down, perhaps drowning them.

Once again, the stanza begins with the line 'Thought they were done'. We don't know who is doing the thinking. Also, the thinking is past tense, which removes us a bit from the scene.

Also, in this stanza there is none of the ambiguity created by the use of pronouns unconnected to any noun. Throughout, the entity doing the thinking considers a 'they' identified as a 'Drenched Chorus'. A few stanzas later the phrase 'pulling under' is used.

In an essay entitled "The Mired Sublime" in Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History (Northwestern UP), Paul Naylor identifies a horizontal, person to person transcendence. This is, I think, the "Mired Sublime" of the title. Could it be that this transcendence is connected not to going upward, but to going down, under the earth where the Andoumboulou live?

Are we to take it that the "Drenched Chorus" is singing as the ship goes down, Titanic, or finding what Lorca calls 'duende'? Also, 'chthonic' is a Greek word for the underground as a place of abundance and death.

Also, pronouns get shifted around again.

What can we confidently say about the first three stanzas of this poem? The focus is on action, not people. Identity is radically fluid, to the point where the boundaries between us dissolve. Attention is paid to the underwater and underground, both places of abundance and fertility, yet also suggestive of death (both physical death but, more importantly, death of the individual self.)

Like 'the rim of a well' that Lorca discusses in relation to 'duende'.

This 'mired sublime' -- from both Naylor's essay and an earlier Andoumboulou poem -- is the moving 'outside, beside / themselves'. It is the place of one sort of creativity, of the love that makes the teeth chatter, and of the uneven creakiness of existence.

What Mackey seems to be describing is 'worshippers' not tied to Western notions of spirituality with its individuality and hierarchy. It is a fluid 'person' to fluid 'person' interaction, interpenetration, permeability.

Beautifully and terrifyingly mired.

Of Custer & Sherlock Holmes

Mark Wallace on his blog has published a fascinating three-part exploration of Custer and Holmes and their attitudes toward women and nonwhite peoples. It is quirky and original. The comments are also good. Click on the title to get there.

Ted Pelton Interview, Part 2

This is the second of a 2-part interview with Ted Pelton, author of Endorsed by Jack Chapeau (Starcherone) and Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals)(Spuyten Duyvil). This part focuses on the novel Malcolm and Jack.

Here are the reviews posted on Amazon:

An audaciously entertaining and insightful creation myth about the genesis of the late 20th century's counterculture and political liberation movements in the so-called birth of the cool in New York City jazz clubs at the end of World War II and dawn of the bebop era.... The overwhelming strength of this novel lies in its ability to dramatize the precise moments in consciousness when both Malcolm Little and Jack Kerouac cease to be criminals and become visionaries instead. --The Buffalo News

At all times Pelton's work is filled with political saavy, an empathy for societies' outcasts, and a frustrated awareness of the writer's limited ability to effect change upon the events he or she records. Malcolm & Jack is not the book you might expect it to be.... Instead, with immense talent, Pelton has attempted to weave implicit cultural critique, reflective internal monologue, three love stories, and a whole bunch of well-wrought character sketches into a series of progressing narratives that harmonize as much as they juxtapose. --Jacket Magazine (Australia)

Malcolm & Jack is a moving, hip, and complex journey into not only American cultural, social, and political history, but also into the meaning of history itself. --American Book Review


1. I respect your determination to assert the power of the novelistic imagination over rigid identity markings. Nonetheless, were you nervous as a white male speaking in the first person voice of Billie Holiday? of assigning feelings and words to Malcolm X, one of the great voices of black liberation?

Yes, I was nervous. My first drafts of the book had long defenses of and discussions of the politics of representation, because you’re right, here I am, this white guy, starting sentences in 1st person, “Brothers and sisters…” this or that, in mimicry of black religious discourse, to give one example. I’m clearly pulling from a tradition or traditions or voices that belong to someone else. But the defenses, while important for me to write, to understand my own ideas about the subject, weren’t good fiction; various readers that I trusted told me I should remove them from the book. They were preachy and lengthy and belabored. So I did remove them from the final version.

Basically, to give you this defense, I see it in two ways. First, while Malcolm X and Billie Holiday are identified with so-called black folks, and especially in the case of Malcolm, would almost belong to black people, I thought that in a certain sense I had some claim on them too. These are people who have inspired me, who are fellow citizens of my country, who describe to me parts of what I feel to be my own identity. I feel that my representations of them are respectful, on the whole even worshipping (although they are also both rendered in unflattering ways at moments in the book). I saw what I was doing as something that’s seemingly much more of a problem in literature than it is in, say, music. The Rolling Stones played Howlin’ Wolf; it wasn’t their lives particularly; but then, in a way, it does become about their lives, the Stones, that is. As a line in the old PBS History of Rock and Roll has it, someone says something to the effect of “The Rolling Stones wanted to honor Howlin’ Wolf, and would have loved nothing better than to sound like Howlin’ Wolf, but when they played Howlin’ Wolf, they sounded like The Rolling Stones.” To me, that’s art, of any sort – pulling from the materials of the world you find and in doing so reflecting who you are, even if it’s by the vehicle of some other tradition. Then, secondly, it occurred to me that I could hardly do otherwise and be a fiction writer. Fiction writing is an art form predicated on representation. You can’t NOT represent, as a fiction writer. The question then becomes, are your representations fair or are they abusive? I cannot say that what I have written cannot be accused of some sort of abuse, and I am always very interested in how my work is read and if someone sees that in there. But as a blanket prohibition, I didn’t think I could swear off using anything as material or point-of-view by its very nature. That seems to me antithetical to what fiction in fact does.

2. Were you also nervous addressing both male and female homosexuality?

Less so. “What else can I say / Everyone is gay,” sang Kurt Cobain. This is probably just as true ultimately of cultural significances, but certainly it seems to me anyone can imagine what it’s like to be same-sex oriented, even if it’s not in them to act upon it, or they aren’t hard-wired in such a way. Besides in a “Beat” book, which it seemed to me I was writing, there’s going to be a certain fluidity to the sexuality. I very much wanted the novel to be one of voices which at the same time privileged no particular perspective – so there’s narrator’s in the book who are gay and straight, black and white, male and female. I am interested in a fiction that’s more complicated than the identity-based fiction of the present moment, which it seems to me is largely market-driven

3. One 44 page chapter is in the form of a play. Why did you choose this, and what did it open up for you (or for your supposed reader)?

I wanted to get a kind of camp sense into this very gay-themed plotline, the story of David Kammerer’s stalking of Lucien Carr, and Carr’s retaliatory murder. I couldn’t really get the entirety of the stage musical I had in mind into the book (I had themes composed in my head for the songs in the final musical number), but it just struck me as a kind of play. And as I worked in that form, I was able to do things that I liked – character asides, monologues of characters walking into and out of scenes, scenes (like in the bar) where dialogue was foregrounded, etc.

4. This book examines the relationships between biography, history, fiction, voice and literary genre / form. Why do these relationships interest you and what did you discover about them in the course of writing this book?

The novel has always interested me as the great catch-all narrative form, where you can include all manner of discourses – history, monologues, as you say biography, etc. I think the postmodern novel is commonly misunderstood these days in being seen to be experimenting just for form’s sake. Form is an extension of content, as we know, when it’s done right and integrally, and postmodern fiction’s play with discourses is a strategy for reflecting upon how language is used and misused in all manner of ways, in public and political life, in constructing fantasies about history, etc. This is a notion I’ve heard expressed by critic Marcel Cornis-Pope, among others, that postmodern fiction foregrounds the problematics of history that depend on narrative, and therefore should not be said, as it often is, to be merely formalist or concerned with aesthetics alone. My book is about the 1940s, which we have been told for years was “America’s Greatest Generation.” Well, they were also Jim Crow racists who exported racism to England during the war, suppressed stories of racial oppression at home as dangerous to the war effort, tolerated lynching, oppressed women with severe double-standards, allowed California produce growers to profit from internment of Japanese-American competitors, etc. So all of these things in the end are competing stories; fiction, at its best, rids the world of the lies of assumed objectivity, which are dangerous and oppressive. That “Greatest Generation” myth has been the underpinning of every failed American war effort ever after, Reagan, Bush I & II, you name it.

At the same time, I think what I discovered anew was the seductiveness of voice. I’d be reading a lot of Malcolm X or Kerouac and after a while I’d start to speak like them, hear their voices in my head. Narrative is extraordinarily powerful because it can act upon you in ways that you believe are yourself behaving independently. Nor is there any way entirely out of this. Self-consciousness is your best bet, being aware of the echoes behind your words or the words of others. But seductions are always occurring, where you get taken with narratives you find sexy and go along unwittingly with unexamined forms of oppression.

5. I really enjoyed the comedy of Kerouac being stuck with his preppy wife in suburban Detroit living in the home of his society mother-in-law.

Thanks, it was fun to write, once I got Edie’s voice down. I hadn’t really known all of the Kerouac biography stuff until I started into the book, from the basic premise of two drop-outs in the popular 1940s war, Malcolm Little and Jack Kerouac, later becoming iconic rebels, larger than life in their embodiments of freedom. But Kerouac lived this bizarre life, all by his mid-20s – football player, accessory to murder, unsuccessful husband. It was fun, too, to play historical characters like Kerouac against characters I’d entirely made up, like Edie’s mother, who I make into this Phyllis Schlafly conservative matron kind of character.

6. The last section deals with the Kinsey Report. It is fascinating the way you were able to intertwine the clinical and the carnal.

Kinsey is fascinating, and it wasn’t until the 1990s, when I was starting this book, that this stuff started to really come out. I didn’t exaggerate any of that, and in fact probably underplayed some of it. Can you imagine having paid employee orgies, as a part of the research agenda of a major university – and in Indiana, of all places!

Part of what the novel is about is the roots of the 1960s liberal and even libertine society being nascent in the 1940s. Kinsey, like Malcolm and like Kerouac, was ahead of his time in imagining freedoms that didn’t yet exist in American society. Imperfectly, to be sure, in all three cases, but heroically, to my mind.

7. Each chapter of this book examines a different aspect of 50's America: jazz, drugs, beatniks, suburbia, prison, race, sex, celebrity. What about the 50's fascinates you? What does this book show us about the 50's?

I always cast it in my mind as the 1940s and the 1960s, as I’ve described it above. The 1950s were that period of transition and error and experiment in between. Malcolm and Jack is also about American Empire, and the 50s is the first decade of true American Empire. American Imperialism, of course, had begun in the late 19th century. But the we-can-do-no-wrong superpower mentality, which reached its psychotic apotheosis in the Guantanamo-Abu Ghraib Bush years, began in the 1940s. It’s something of a parable of why war is so dangerous and insidious. Hitler obviously was someone who had to be resisted and defeated. But the narrative it spawned was too intoxicating, so much so that the son of a combatant of those days, Bush Jr., was entirely absorbed by it to such an extent he felt it as a vision, stronger than facts themselves, the “reality-based community” he felt free to disregard, so possessed by glory did he feel himself to be. The national euphoria of war victory created that; anxieties persisted throughout the fifties and a full-scale rebellion tried to resist it in the sixties, but the narrative stuck around.

Maybe it’s a pathetic kind of fantasy in itself to think that a novel can oppose the most powerful people in the world. But you use what you have. And as fantasies go, it’s not a particularly harmful one.

But why the 50s also has the answer that children are drawn to correcting the mistakes of their parents’ generation. I grew up in the late 60s and 70s. My wife and I are about to have our first child, who will probably someday construct stories of my own wrongheaded, dangerous, misguided ways.

On Song of the Andoumboulou:17 (Whatsaid Serif)

Allusions and quotations

#17 begins with a Laccariere quote from The Gnostics — "to remove the very categories of I, He, and to become We, such must be the meaning of the so-called 'mysteries of the Simonioans'."

The Gnostics is a fascinating, poetic look at Gnosis from what was known in the early 70's. It is well-worth reading.

"Simonians" — Followers of the Gnostic Magus Simon. The Gnostics believe that the God of Genesis was a cruel demon who created this world, with all its suffering. The good God is somewhere, almost inaccessible to human beings, outside this world. All humans contain a divine spark which connects them to this God. Our material bodies weigh down this spark.

Ogotemmeli, the primary informant for Marcel Griaule about the Dogon, also mentions God's "primordial blunder." (Naylor's essay helped me to see this conjuntion, which I had missed earlier.)

Underneath the title of the poem in italics is the phrase "rim of the well." This comes from a Lorca discussion on duende, see here. In it, Lorca distinguishes duende from the angel and the muse. The angel and the muse are both outside and command; duende is in the blood and is the vitality and force that distinguishes great art from technically proficient art. I wonder about the extent to which it can be compared to the African-American and American, more generally, notion of 'soul'.

chthonic - Greek for the interior of the earth; also for cults of the earth that participated in ritual sacrifice for their gods —ex., Persephone.

lapis-light — intense blue color, based on lapis lazuli rocks

kola — tree native to West Africa with edible nuts.

Ogun — god of iron in voodoun of West Africa and the Carribean

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it, many of the poems can be found here.]

The poem begins with a past tense verb that has no subject. "Thought they were done." The first stanza also contains a "we," "he," and "she," all three of which have no noun referents. This ties in with the quotation from Lacarriere. Also, Mackey plays with tense: she remembers that she saw a he, who was hit by a "he." Is it the same he, or different ones? More importantly, does it matter? Naylor suggests that this moment where he and she transpose themselves is ecstatic. And he his correct. I would just add that Mackey is describing ecstasy, not, to a degree, enacting it.

This creaking of the pronouns causes us to focus not on the nouns, which only have shifting placeholders, but the active verbs: "Swirl," "spoke," "whir," "saw," "remembers," "brought up," "came to," "saw" all appear in the first stanza. Is Mackey creating a stanza where human individuation becomes as unimportant as single seeds when myriad ones are being blown off a tree? The action of the whole is what attracts our attention, not differentiation at the level of particle.

This is true except for one image at the end of the stanza. A 'he' is hit with a rock on on the side of the head. This sort of pain must cause differentiation. What I see this stanza doing is moving through an emphasis on action to the point where differentiation is caused by an act, but the specifics of who is differentiated are not given.

Finally, the form of this stanza must be taken into account. This poem uses a form very similar to Song #50. As always, the left margin is jagged, with no lines close to each other starting at the same place. Notice how in the first stanza several words are on a line by themselves appear toward the right margin. A stanza break occurs after "end we'd eventually see." The first stanza of Song # 17 contains three words isolated on lines and placed toward the write margin. They are "he," "who," and "late." Perhaps significantly, all three words point towards the displacements in this stanza — both the prounial and tense ("late").

To me, each of these words pulls me up toward a provisional ending. They feel like pregnant pauses. Yet the pregnant pauses occur when empty placeholders are used: pronouns with no noun referents.

The form also contributes to the energy of the stanza by the dancing lines themselves, skipping down the page, usually economical and often nongrammatical — jazz music that is steady usually has little appeal. These stanza dance and sway, in this case performing the slippage, what Mackey might be calling the creaking, of the language.

Am I saying that Mackey's form enables him to enact the creaking he describes as the mobile foundation of language?

Mackey I still think is a reflective poet, but he manages to reflect by burrowing into cracks and fissures opened by the creaking of language, not, as is traditionally the case, standing entirely outside the subject matter and making pronouncements in meter.

This is a a lot for one post, and, accept for the allusions and quotations section which took into account the whole poem, I only discussed the first stanza, 13 lines. This discussion will probably serve as a kind of basis for a quicker examination of the rest of this five page poem.