[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.]
Allusions
What-sayer — The recipient of a narrative. See the epigram to the book by Ellen Basso. Click "here" above.
Oudada — There is a hill in Tunisia named Jebel Ouadada map. However, both Jeff Gray and Megan Simpson in the Spring 2000 Callaloo claim that it is a mythical place of Mackey's creation that stands for an aboriginal collective. Is this corroborated by anything Mackey said in an interview? I don't know.
Onem would seem to be another such mythical place.
Ciskei — a homeland in South Africa during apartheid.
Qareeb — on Amazon.com I have located a number of albums that seem to come from the Arab world and use this word somewhere in the name of the performer. Does it suggest musical performer?
"People Get Ready" — A 1965 hit song by the Impressions, written by Curtis Mayfield. "Part of the March on Washington's legacy is its music. Singer and songwriter Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" was written in the year after the march. For many, it captured the spirit of the march -- the song reaches across racial and religious lines to offer a message of redemption and forgiveness." — NPR
Pres — Lester "Prez" Young, tenor saxophone great, known for, among other things, his playing behind (with) Billie Holiday
Abdel Salim — Sudanese musician
_____________________________________________________________
The key lines to this eight-page poem appear in the second stanza: "brought, bought, /sold / on blocks." This is a poem that explores some of the world-wide implications of slavery in the Americas.
The first two sentences spit back at an unidentified "he." "Whatever he said I would / say so what." He then approaches slavery elliptically in this first stanza: "Boated whether / we came by train or by / bus." "Boated" in this context I think points to the middle passage, which left Africans feeling "where we were might 've / been the moon." It is important also to note that all other forms of transportation — train, bus — were preceded by and conditioned by the middle passage.
"Bleak / survival egged us on." I take it that the "us" refers to enslaved Africans and their descendants in the new world. Strange images such as a "tin bird," "a spectral advance" and a "peripatetic spur" suggest a haunting relentlessness, and always shifting perception.
It is also, of course, cruel: thinking they were on the way to the aboriginal haven of Ouadada, they instead found themselves in Dadaoua. This anapestic maneuver not only highlights the outlandish cruelty of slavery, but uses a European word, Dada, to get at it. The absurdities and cruelties of Europe, "Dada," upend the African haven of Ouadada.
The word "peripatetic" is used again to emphasize this strangeness: first they are on a train, then in a tavern, then a mind that cannot settle anywhere. Until one horrible, half-given image concretizes power: "South, more / news of slaughter. Something / we saw we hoped we only / imagined we saw." I take it that a lynching is being described, and it is essential that we note Mackey's elliptical approach to it. I take it that the accumulation of highly specific details works into a realization on the part of the reader. This South is a confusing place in addition to being horrible: "words meaning / more / than the world they / point at." This connects with the (non)description of the lynching by emphasizing the gap between word and idea.
However, we need to see that Mackey is doing more than unhinging the signifier from the signified. He is placing language, with its inconsistencies, its overreaching, its inabilities, its instabilities, into the horror of slavery.
The final stanza in this portion of the poem points to an uprising, "People Get Ready." Sitting on a train, "we / glimpsed, / 'not yet' yelled at every / stop / Stone rail. Stone clime. Stone / motion." The 'not yet' is, I take it, a reference to the 'go slow' slogan of Southern whites during Civil Rights. Also, a "Beast in kin's clothing" is mentioned, and a reference is made to Ciskei, a portion of South Africa where Joshua Oupa Gqozo's troop's fired on members of the African National Congress on September 7th 1992, known as the Bisho Massacre. 28 members of the ANC died. Black people were slaughtering each other.
The rest of the stanza contains images of slave escape: "Went to run but what was /now most real was the 'away / from.'" And the horns (I assume those associated with bloodhounds) wooed the unready, i.e. kept those too scared from running just yet.
And where did they want to run to: the aboriginal collective, Ouadada. Ouadada is either a hill in a desert in Tunisia, or a mythic place of Mackey's creation. Either way, these people could not find what they were running for because it didn't exist.
There was no freedom in America, even north of the Ohio River.
Mackey starts the next stanza about halfway down the next page and underneath a horizontal line. Obviously, he is clearly demarcating this portion of the poem from what came before.
The central metaphor of the stanza is again a train, which now more clearly than ever is the underground railroad. Confusion still remained -- "wondered was it even a train we were on" — and dreamtime. There is a dreamt image of a kiss on an in-flight movie. Why does Mackey collapse time in this manner, by including images of airplane flight with images of slavery? Perhaps, because African Americans still are on the underground railroad, and their having to be there may always haunt our national consciousness. Mackey is moving in mythic time, not linear time. And both mythic and linear time are, in many ways, more 'real' to us than clock time.
To illustrate this, I can pose a simple question: what is a more emotional experience, to hear that it is one o'clock or to hear at this time the runaway slaves arrived safely into freedom? In our culture we are often encouraged to think of the tools of science, such as a clock, as more real than our own feelings, thoughts, and gleanings. It follows that Mackey's use of mythic time is, in many ways, more in keeping with how we move around in time during our everyday affairs.
He ends the stanza by referring to "the collective kiss we called Ouadada." This time, Ouadada is even more qualified as a destination. The lines after it read "Leapt / across / unwon space, pure / caprice."
"Caprice"? "unwon space"? Is this what Mackey is calling the territory the slaves escaped to?
In the next, long stanza Mackey continues to discuss the underground railroad and its implications. Now, he seems to focus on one family, "an awayness / receding as fast as / he approached." I assume the "awayness" refers to the distance to the plantation from which the former slaves were escaping, and that "he" is the slave catcher in hot pursuit.
The stanza is long, bending its way back and forth down the page, perhaps mimicing the difficult and continuous journey, punctuated by stops, but emotionally draining all the time. Within the stanza I have some trouble with the early imagery. He discusses a plain, flat, and "Raz," which would seem to be a god of some sort, with "e on the end." Making it "Raze." Was the plain the result of a razing, a purposeful destruction and flattening of property to expose the escaping slaves?
In the middle lines of the stanza Mackey focuses on the harrowing ride, "conductorless," "ghost." Finally, in some more accessible lines, Mackey describes what I take to be a male and female runaway in a shed for the night: "sophic / skirt with him under / it as if it was a / tent, pitched as / would a note be." This 'him' I assume is performing cunnilingus on wisdom. There is a wish throughout this sentence that "wood be water," that dryness give way (cunnilingus), that water to freedom appears (Ohio River, Niagara River) out of the woods.
Again, the next couple stanzas are placed on the next page beneath a horizontal line. They take on a whole different group of images, notably, a scroll that is red, yellow, and green, the colors of the Ethiopian and Mali flags, among others. Disembarcation and abjuration are also a part of this stanza: I believe that he is referring to people abjuring their U.S. citizenship and going back to Africa, perhaps with Marcus Garvey.
Again, we have the big break that goes on to the next line and has a horizontal line above it. The image cluster here brings in parts of what show up earlier in the poem: wood turning to water, a hut (this time burning), a "white wreck," and the word "razed" shows up. The stanza ends with "had we had our way." However, Mackey does not give us enough to know either what this "way" is or what would have happened had "we" got it. There is a sadness to these lines: is Mackey thinking the environmental wrecklessness of white people, the wreck of solace, the phosphorus in water? If so, he is linking environmental devastation to slavery. He ends the stanza with a wistful "had we had out way."
The following stanza is incredibly strange and elliptical, about two men, one of whom said he would say nothing and the other whatever popped into his head. Then, they both say "nothing." They do mention that there is a world somewhere but they don't know how to get there. Are they the Andoumboulou, living in the earth, a failed human rough draft who are, in mythical time, also us?
In the final stanza, there is a lot of separation, limits, and borders: rift, asymptotic (study of limits), nearness, rode thru, there, nowhere. Qareeb seems to be the name of a musician in the Arab world, and Prez is the great Lester Young, who played with Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and while leading his own combos. Music seems to be a "way of holding the world at bay" allowing us to get a glimpse of it in passing.
Thoughout this stanza Mackey uses the word "star" and some of its anagrams: Rast, Tsar. Apparently, people are the illusion, not the music, the rasping music of the complex, elliptical, nuanced. "Sudan it seemed it was / we rode thru, / there / nowhere and where we / were." Nowhere else has Mackey so explicitly and accessibly stated that these poems offer gleanings and glancings, glimpses and guesses. There is no way to take the whole offered, not even a way to take a part of a whole. Because there is no whole.
Multiplicity is fundamental.
How do these more metaphysical terms tie into the images with the underground railroad? Is it a concern that Mackey treated slavery in such an elliptical manner? Why are these disparate concerns contained in one poem?
All for later.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Simultaneous Interview
by Ron Riekki & Rafeal Alvarez
Rafael Alvarez is a long-time Baltimore Sun reporter, author of Orlo and Leini, and a writer for HBO's The Wire. Ron Reikki has just published a novel U.P., (Ghost Road Press).
RIEKKI: List your top five experimental novels.
ALVAREZ: zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance, mostly because I'm still not sure if it's a novel and it took me to the next place in my rosebush to rosebush meditations.
ALVAREZ: i don't like experimental music of any kind but the Mothers of Invention always did a good job of playing the sheet music Frank gave them. "Jazz isn't dead," said Zappa,"it just smells funny."
Rafael Alvarez is a long-time Baltimore Sun reporter, author of Orlo and Leini, and a writer for HBO's The Wire. Ron Reikki has just published a novel U.P., (Ghost Road Press).
RIEKKI: List your top five experimental novels.
ALVAREZ: zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance, mostly because I'm still not sure if it's a novel and it took me to the next place in my rosebush to rosebush meditations.
you were largely unschooled and then self taught and then hyper schooled in the art of storytelling. do you think writers can invent themselves out of thin air at the public library?
RIEKKI: Absolutely.
RIEKKI: Absolutely.
Who's your favorite experimental jazz musician?
ALVAREZ: i don't like experimental music of any kind but the Mothers of Invention always did a good job of playing the sheet music Frank gave them. "Jazz isn't dead," said Zappa,"it just smells funny."
should libraries stock books that only a few folks are going to read or instead spend the money on 30 copies of the new james patterson novel?
RIEKKI: Screw James Patterson.
RIEKKI: Screw James Patterson.
I know you're a Dylan fan. Do you see Dylan's lyrics as experimental? Is there a line from one of his songs that you find transcends typical lyric writing? What about the line do you find impressive? Can you put it in words?
ALVAREZ: Bob Dylan is an American troubadour. Nothing he does is experimental. It's all in the songbook Rod Stewart will never be able to find on the shelf.
ALVAREZ: Bob Dylan is an American troubadour. Nothing he does is experimental. It's all in the songbook Rod Stewart will never be able to find on the shelf.
Borges said the universe is one huge library - a labyrinth of stacks without end. Do you agree or disagree and why?
RIEKKI: I agree. There is an infinite amount of knowledge. That's a reason I went to school forever. I like to get lost in the labyrinth of knowledge. I used to love the University of Virginia library, because I could actually get lost down in its dungeons. I liked the smell--a cross of wisdom and paper. Do you think television writing can be experimental? Do you think The Wire was experimental compared to other television?
ALVAREZ: The Wire was old school storytelling - two parts Greek to one part Russian - married to an art form - series television - that has only existed for about 60 years or so. I think of the word experimental as folks who don't quite know what they're doing throw shit against the wall to see if it sticks. David Simon knew exactly what he was doing.
RIEKKI: I agree. There is an infinite amount of knowledge. That's a reason I went to school forever. I like to get lost in the labyrinth of knowledge. I used to love the University of Virginia library, because I could actually get lost down in its dungeons. I liked the smell--a cross of wisdom and paper. Do you think television writing can be experimental? Do you think The Wire was experimental compared to other television?
ALVAREZ: The Wire was old school storytelling - two parts Greek to one part Russian - married to an art form - series television - that has only existed for about 60 years or so. I think of the word experimental as folks who don't quite know what they're doing throw shit against the wall to see if it sticks. David Simon knew exactly what he was doing.
would you be willing to pay an increase in sales tax - say an extra penny per dollar purchase - if you knew it was going to fund public libraries?
RIEKKI: No. I'd do it though if it went into making Borders less of a Kafkaesque nightmare. U.P. was nominated by National Book Award winner John Casey for the Sewanee Writers' Series and Ann Beattie who is in Best American Short Stories of the Century called me up to personally tell me how much she loved the writing, but when I've contacted Borders and Books-A-Million about getting my novel into their stores, they've treated me like scum. I don't get that. You'd think if a bookstore would want to treat anyone well, it'd be an author. But those two stores are nightmares for quality small publishers. They've become corporate at a level that they've lost the sense that authors are people. Luckily, I've run into a ton of small bookstores who've been kind, receptive, and communal with me and my book--places like The Country Village Bookstore, The Gnu's Room Bookstore, Snowbound Books, The Touch of Finland, and Russo's Books have given me hope that bookstores understand if you want to encourage new writers to write, then you have to carry their books . . . and, you'll find their audience. My book has been Ghost Road Press's bestseller in fiction for 21 weeks now and that's despite complete rejection by Borders and Books-A-Million. I have to add though that B. Dalton and Barnes & Noble have been kind enough to put me in their local authors sections and I'm appreciative to them for that.
This would probably be your first internet mention of your Ghost Road Press contract for a non-fiction book you're writing. Ghost Road publisher Matt Davis is a fan of writing that operates outside of the mainstream. What will be your approach to writing the book? Do you feel being on Ghost Road that you can do anything you want, that you have more freedom than writing journalism or for TV?
ALVAREZ: I will get back to you with a much longer answer to this question. please remind me. What is the best/worst public library experience you've ever had.
RIEKKI: What first comes to mind under the worst category is--a library banned me from doing interviews at it. I was working as a freelance journalist and I quoted a librarian as saying "ain't" (she did, I have it on tape) and she had a fit that I'd represent her as someone as uneducated enough as to say "ain't." So they wouldn't let me do interviews at that library after that. I also got banned from a bar in that same city for another story I wrote. As far as the best experience--I had a girlfriend kiss me in a library once, sitting on my lap. It was the library at Brandeis. I found it incredibly romantic. There should be more kissing in libraries.
RIEKKI: No. I'd do it though if it went into making Borders less of a Kafkaesque nightmare. U.P. was nominated by National Book Award winner John Casey for the Sewanee Writers' Series and Ann Beattie who is in Best American Short Stories of the Century called me up to personally tell me how much she loved the writing, but when I've contacted Borders and Books-A-Million about getting my novel into their stores, they've treated me like scum. I don't get that. You'd think if a bookstore would want to treat anyone well, it'd be an author. But those two stores are nightmares for quality small publishers. They've become corporate at a level that they've lost the sense that authors are people. Luckily, I've run into a ton of small bookstores who've been kind, receptive, and communal with me and my book--places like The Country Village Bookstore, The Gnu's Room Bookstore, Snowbound Books, The Touch of Finland, and Russo's Books have given me hope that bookstores understand if you want to encourage new writers to write, then you have to carry their books . . . and, you'll find their audience. My book has been Ghost Road Press's bestseller in fiction for 21 weeks now and that's despite complete rejection by Borders and Books-A-Million. I have to add though that B. Dalton and Barnes & Noble have been kind enough to put me in their local authors sections and I'm appreciative to them for that.
This would probably be your first internet mention of your Ghost Road Press contract for a non-fiction book you're writing. Ghost Road publisher Matt Davis is a fan of writing that operates outside of the mainstream. What will be your approach to writing the book? Do you feel being on Ghost Road that you can do anything you want, that you have more freedom than writing journalism or for TV?
ALVAREZ: I will get back to you with a much longer answer to this question. please remind me. What is the best/worst public library experience you've ever had.
RIEKKI: What first comes to mind under the worst category is--a library banned me from doing interviews at it. I was working as a freelance journalist and I quoted a librarian as saying "ain't" (she did, I have it on tape) and she had a fit that I'd represent her as someone as uneducated enough as to say "ain't." So they wouldn't let me do interviews at that library after that. I also got banned from a bar in that same city for another story I wrote. As far as the best experience--I had a girlfriend kiss me in a library once, sitting on my lap. It was the library at Brandeis. I found it incredibly romantic. There should be more kissing in libraries.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Andoumboulou 19
[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.]
Allusions / Definitions
Cerno Bokar (also know as Tierno Bokar) — Bokar (1883-1940) was a Sufi mystic who lived in what is now Mali. He sent missionaries to the Dogon in an effort to convert at least some of the tribe's people. Mackey is probably referring to a rift in the West African Sufi community that the French colonial power used to its advantage.
Most of my information comes from this site: < http://www.tiernobokar.columbia.edu/background.html. As you can see, it's associated with Columbia University.
A biography appeared in 1986, West African Sufi: The Religious Heritage and Spiritual Search of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal, by Louis Brenner. I am getting some of my knowledge from reviews of the book by William R. Darrow, Lamin Sanneh, C.C. Stewart, Danal B. Cruise O'Brien, Peter Clarke.
This book, of course, appeared well after the poems were written. Did Mackey consult The Life and Teaching of Tierno Bokar: The Sage of Bandiagara (Paris: Editions Présence Africaine, 1957) by Amadou Hampaté Bås?
Sophist — Teaching of wisdom. The name given to pre-Socratic thinkers who were discredited by post-Plato Western philosophy at least until Nietszche.
Kanoun — Arab musical instrument. From what I can tell, similar to an oud.
Sidi Brahim — Algerian red wine.
Hsissen — Apparently, an Algerian musician. I can find nothing more.
Ogo — Dogon trickster god.
Gnaoua — Moroccan musicians
Revenant — Visible ghost that haunts the living.
Imperium — Power, authority
Henna — Flowering plant, used for dying skin and hair in North Africa
_____________________________________________________________
In this very ambitious poem Mackey crosses the Strait of Gibralter and connects the culture of Southern Spain to Morocco and West Africa. Of course, it helps to keep in mind that Spain was conquered by the Moors for a number of centuries before 1400.
The poem begins where the last one left off: In the Long Night Lounge. However, this time it is given two more names: "Wrack Tavern" and "Inn of Many Monikers." This comes after a fascinating opening sentence that places the emphasis on words of logic and strange adjectives rather than the weak verb and subject: " Notwithstanding we stood miragelike, / outless the world he'd have / given regardless, / Ahtt were it / otherwise." (my italics) 'Notwithstanding' is a word of rhetoric and logic, it concedes some sort of point before making a stronger one. But the concession in this case leads only to self-erasing words: since a mirage is the word for an appearance that is not real, "miragelike" would refer to the likeness of a likeness, removing us one step further from what was an illusion in the first place; by its very nature the suffix 'less' negates the word in front of it, so does "outless" mean "in," or is it referring to a liminal place; "world" is used in an unusual way because it's not clear how a tiny somone can give a world; "Ahatt" we learn in one of Mackey's interviews is an anagram for "that" which serves here, in part, as a name.
What does this all add up to? A scene that language cannot get at except through indirection and angles so severe as to virtually cancel out what is there. Does this sentence give us anything other than this sense of cancelling? I believe so. It gives as the liminility of being like an appearance, in a region perhaps between out and in, a place where letters still have provisional meaning, even when their order is shuffled.
In the next few lines we get the association of language with the body — "skin," "flesh eloquence"; the allusion to Cerno Bokar and the book, perhaps the Koran; finally, the wisdom, apparently associated with Bokar, that rattles the stranger as he spoke, "bits of glass / puncture his lips." We move here from language, wisdom and speaking being connected to the body, to severe pain.
We quickly switch to a Sophic "thigh," "belly," "butt," "sway," and "midriff" (among other body parts) causing the stranger to be "taken out." He lets out a sound beneath the level of language, obviously sexual, a sound that even haunted its maker, in addition to the "she," "I," and "we" that are, in some inexplicable way, present.
We end with the sound of a muted kanoun blowing through "our bones."
The first half of this poem weaves together that aspect of language situated in the body, sexuality, and primal responses with the seemingly sacred: the sufi mystic. And this Sufi mystic was brought down by doctrinal disagreements that the French used to their political advantage.
The religious pulled to the earthly.
There is nothing in the first section of the poem that suggests Bokar is a transcendental figure, even though he is seen as such by some traditions.
After the stanza break the lounge changes names again, this time to Blue Sufi, and in the lounge they sip an Algerian red. An Algerian musician hits a "note no / one knew existed," a song associated with the Andoumboulou, the rough draft of human beings living in the earth (Dogon mythology), and the Dogon god of mishchief. Moving north from Mali, to Algeria, the mysterious Moroccan musicians known as the Gnaoua.
This is a classic cross cultural moment, one that brings together strands of culture from Spain to the horn of Africa — "whirled, unravelling, whir." There is a sense that something is happening, but to fully grasp it is beyond us. (Wisdom hurts.)
What's more, wisdom appears in the form of a woman, Sophia. Only this woman is not Greek, but Algerian, and she describes herself as a "Bedouin hick." Once again, Mackey insists on decentering the Eurocentric worldview, emphasizing the wisdom of the conquered and colonized "hicks."
It's not clear who Sophia is interested in: All we know is that his middle name is "music." The result is that, whoever the male half of 'they' is, "events had brought them to this." A place where wisdom, language, music and sexuality ("sway of / palms / and of hips") all caress, embrace, creak, cut and thrum inside and outside the body ("outless.)"
The languages are many, the wisdom from various hicks, the music from a variety of West African and Southern European cultures, and the sexuality attached as much to culture — "henna," "Bedouin" — as it is to primal urges.
The word "wrack" has appeared throughout the poem.The poem ends by wondering about a possible qualified "salvage." We might learn what 'salvage' refers to in Mackey's shifting, dynamic, and "miragelike" world in the poems to come.
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Weaver
Sent: Jul 22, 2009 12:39 PM
To: Jefferson Hansen
Subject: Wrack Tavern
[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.]
Allusions / Definitions
Cerno Bokar (also know as Tierno Bokar) — Bokar (1883-1940) was a Sufi mystic who lived in what is now Mali. He sent missionaries to the Dogon in an effort to convert at least some of the tribe's people. Mackey is probably referring to a rift in the West African Sufi community that the French colonial power used to its advantage.
Most of my information comes from this site: < http://www.tiernobokar.columbia.edu/background.html. As you can see, it's associated with Columbia University.
A biography appeared in 1986, West African Sufi: The Religious Heritage and Spiritual Search of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal, by Louis Brenner. I am getting some of my knowledge from reviews of the book by William R. Darrow, Lamin Sanneh, C.C. Stewart, Danal B. Cruise O'Brien, Peter Clarke.
This book, of course, appeared well after the poems were written. Did Mackey consult The Life and Teaching of Tierno Bokar: The Sage of Bandiagara (Paris: Editions Présence Africaine, 1957) by Amadou Hampaté Bås?
Sophist — Teaching of wisdom. The name given to pre-Socratic thinkers who were discredited by post-Plato Western philosophy at least until Nietszche.
Kanoun — Arab musical instrument. From what I can tell, similar to an oud.
Sidi Brahim — Algerian red wine.
Hsissen — Apparently, an Algerian musician. I can find nothing more.
Ogo — Dogon trickster god.
Gnaoua — Moroccan musicians
Revenant — Visible ghost that haunts the living.
Imperium — Power, authority
Henna — Flowering plant, used for dying skin and hair in North Africa
_____________________________________________________________
In this very ambitious poem Mackey crosses the Strait of Gibralter and connects the culture of Southern Spain to Morocco and West Africa. Of course, it helps to keep in mind that Spain was conquered by the Moors for a number of centuries before 1400.
The poem begins where the last one left off: In the Long Night Lounge. However, this time it is given two more names: "Wrack Tavern" and "Inn of Many Monikers." This comes after a fascinating opening sentence that places the emphasis on words of logic and strange adjectives rather than the weak verb and subject: " Notwithstanding we stood miragelike, / outless the world he'd have / given regardless, / Ahtt were it / otherwise." (my italics) 'Notwithstanding' is a word of rhetoric and logic, it concedes some sort of point before making a stronger one. But the concession in this case leads only to self-erasing words: since a mirage is the word for an appearance that is not real, "miragelike" would refer to the likeness of a likeness, removing us one step further from what was an illusion in the first place; by its very nature the suffix 'less' negates the word in front of it, so does "outless" mean "in," or is it referring to a liminal place; "world" is used in an unusual way because it's not clear how a tiny somone can give a world; "Ahatt" we learn in one of Mackey's interviews is an anagram for "that" which serves here, in part, as a name.
What does this all add up to? A scene that language cannot get at except through indirection and angles so severe as to virtually cancel out what is there. Does this sentence give us anything other than this sense of cancelling? I believe so. It gives as the liminility of being like an appearance, in a region perhaps between out and in, a place where letters still have provisional meaning, even when their order is shuffled.
In the next few lines we get the association of language with the body — "skin," "flesh eloquence"; the allusion to Cerno Bokar and the book, perhaps the Koran; finally, the wisdom, apparently associated with Bokar, that rattles the stranger as he spoke, "bits of glass / puncture his lips." We move here from language, wisdom and speaking being connected to the body, to severe pain.
We quickly switch to a Sophic "thigh," "belly," "butt," "sway," and "midriff" (among other body parts) causing the stranger to be "taken out." He lets out a sound beneath the level of language, obviously sexual, a sound that even haunted its maker, in addition to the "she," "I," and "we" that are, in some inexplicable way, present.
We end with the sound of a muted kanoun blowing through "our bones."
The first half of this poem weaves together that aspect of language situated in the body, sexuality, and primal responses with the seemingly sacred: the sufi mystic. And this Sufi mystic was brought down by doctrinal disagreements that the French used to their political advantage.
The religious pulled to the earthly.
There is nothing in the first section of the poem that suggests Bokar is a transcendental figure, even though he is seen as such by some traditions.
After the stanza break the lounge changes names again, this time to Blue Sufi, and in the lounge they sip an Algerian red. An Algerian musician hits a "note no / one knew existed," a song associated with the Andoumboulou, the rough draft of human beings living in the earth (Dogon mythology), and the Dogon god of mishchief. Moving north from Mali, to Algeria, the mysterious Moroccan musicians known as the Gnaoua.
This is a classic cross cultural moment, one that brings together strands of culture from Spain to the horn of Africa — "whirled, unravelling, whir." There is a sense that something is happening, but to fully grasp it is beyond us. (Wisdom hurts.)
What's more, wisdom appears in the form of a woman, Sophia. Only this woman is not Greek, but Algerian, and she describes herself as a "Bedouin hick." Once again, Mackey insists on decentering the Eurocentric worldview, emphasizing the wisdom of the conquered and colonized "hicks."
It's not clear who Sophia is interested in: All we know is that his middle name is "music." The result is that, whoever the male half of 'they' is, "events had brought them to this." A place where wisdom, language, music and sexuality ("sway of / palms / and of hips") all caress, embrace, creak, cut and thrum inside and outside the body ("outless.)"
The languages are many, the wisdom from various hicks, the music from a variety of West African and Southern European cultures, and the sexuality attached as much to culture — "henna," "Bedouin" — as it is to primal urges.
The word "wrack" has appeared throughout the poem.The poem ends by wondering about a possible qualified "salvage." We might learn what 'salvage' refers to in Mackey's shifting, dynamic, and "miragelike" world in the poems to come.
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Weaver
Sent: Jul 22, 2009 12:39 PM
To: Jefferson Hansen
Subject: Wrack Tavern
Hey Jefferson--
Here's a possibly useful gloss on NM's Wrack Tavern/Inn of Many Monikers figures, the only one I've ever been able to find:
"One could liken the journey within the Haqiqat, within the Truth, to training in a divine university, the Tavern of Ruin (Kharabat). In this true center for higher education there are no professors, one's only guide being Absolute Love. Before a perfect being enters this university, he or she can be defined. However, upon entering the Truth, such a being is indefinable, beyond the realm of words."
Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, In the Tavern of Ruin: Seven Essays on Sufism
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Reflective, Cross-cultural Immanence
[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.]
To say that Mackey is a poet of immanence is to leave him open to deconstruction. In order to distinguish itself as a concept, immanence needs to define itself against something, probably something in opposition to it. This is the concept of transcendence.
Transcendence suggests the act of standing completely outside a frame of reference. Sometimes, this frame of reference is considered earthly existence itself, and this is referred to as religious transcendence.
If I am reading him in a fair manner, this is the trouble for Mackey: even as he denies transcendence, he also implicitly asserts it as a way of demarcating the essential concept of immanence. This is the deconstruction.
I believe that Mackey sidesteps this issue through his notion of cross-culturality (which is mentioned in the subtitle to a collection of his critical pieces, Discrepant Engagement.) This concept allows Mackey to assert that there are distinguishing limits in immanence, but they are not between it and transcendence. They are between various cultures, and the complicated liminal zone between them.
Cross cultural contact is always a "discrepant engagement," alwasy revealing, concealing, and distracting. Opening only to skitter sideways or to close up or to creak.
That said, we can "know" each other, if knowledge is understaood as a process and not a possession, as the work of creaking. It is also important to note that cross cutrual contact and tensions take place not only between cultures but, in large, complex societies, within a culture.
In short, to get over the immanence - transcendence dichotomy, we substitute the notion of cross-culturality for it. This leaves us in this world, in the shadows and darkness of duende, with no transcendental light, groping and feeling and searching our way toward partial glints and sights in the process of knowledge.
One last word: I believe that rhetorically we need to address the dichotomy in order to clearly demarcate the terrain of cross-culturality. Once we have done that, we can actually discuss Mackey with the nuance he deserves.
[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.]
To say that Mackey is a poet of immanence is to leave him open to deconstruction. In order to distinguish itself as a concept, immanence needs to define itself against something, probably something in opposition to it. This is the concept of transcendence.
Transcendence suggests the act of standing completely outside a frame of reference. Sometimes, this frame of reference is considered earthly existence itself, and this is referred to as religious transcendence.
If I am reading him in a fair manner, this is the trouble for Mackey: even as he denies transcendence, he also implicitly asserts it as a way of demarcating the essential concept of immanence. This is the deconstruction.
I believe that Mackey sidesteps this issue through his notion of cross-culturality (which is mentioned in the subtitle to a collection of his critical pieces, Discrepant Engagement.) This concept allows Mackey to assert that there are distinguishing limits in immanence, but they are not between it and transcendence. They are between various cultures, and the complicated liminal zone between them.
Cross cultural contact is always a "discrepant engagement," alwasy revealing, concealing, and distracting. Opening only to skitter sideways or to close up or to creak.
That said, we can "know" each other, if knowledge is understaood as a process and not a possession, as the work of creaking. It is also important to note that cross cutrual contact and tensions take place not only between cultures but, in large, complex societies, within a culture.
In short, to get over the immanence - transcendence dichotomy, we substitute the notion of cross-culturality for it. This leaves us in this world, in the shadows and darkness of duende, with no transcendental light, groping and feeling and searching our way toward partial glints and sights in the process of knowledge.
One last word: I believe that rhetorically we need to address the dichotomy in order to clearly demarcate the terrain of cross-culturality. Once we have done that, we can actually discuss Mackey with the nuance he deserves.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Duende
[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.]
Christopher Maurer in his preface to Lorca's In Search of Duende, notes that Lorca, after writing his original essay on "Deep Songs" in 1922, met a number of professional cante jondo and flamenco musicians. He could see from observing that these people wrestled with duende at their most intense artistic moments.
As a result, he stripped his theory of some of the more Romantic elements: flamenco is bad, cante jondo is good; city is bad, rural is good, etc. Granted, Lorca did not work with these dichotomies in a uselessly oppositional manner, but his thinking did become sharper.
In his 1933 essay "Play and Theory of Duende" Lorca sees duende as a fertile, grounded source that all art needs to contend with in order to generate true power. It is more important than technique or craft:
"La Niña de los Peines had to tear her voice because ... she had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight her hand-to-hand .. Her voice was no longer playing. It was a jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity" (53).
The dichotomy in this essay is not between flamenco and deep song, but between duende and the shallow art that emanates from heartless, bloodless skill.
Lorca does connect duende with some types of religious feeling in this essay. However, the religiosity is grounded and dramatic, not at all transcendental. And, I wonder if Mackey makes much use of this aspect of Lorca's theory.
"Song of the Andoumboulou 17" begins with a direct quotation from this essay: "the rim of the well." Here is the wider context:
"The Duende, on the other hand, will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death, if he is not convinced he will circle death's house, if there is not every assurance he can rustle the branches borne aloft by us all, that neither have, nor may ever have, the power to console.
[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.]
Christopher Maurer in his preface to Lorca's In Search of Duende, notes that Lorca, after writing his original essay on "Deep Songs" in 1922, met a number of professional cante jondo and flamenco musicians. He could see from observing that these people wrestled with duende at their most intense artistic moments.
As a result, he stripped his theory of some of the more Romantic elements: flamenco is bad, cante jondo is good; city is bad, rural is good, etc. Granted, Lorca did not work with these dichotomies in a uselessly oppositional manner, but his thinking did become sharper.
In his 1933 essay "Play and Theory of Duende" Lorca sees duende as a fertile, grounded source that all art needs to contend with in order to generate true power. It is more important than technique or craft:
"La Niña de los Peines had to tear her voice because ... she had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight her hand-to-hand .. Her voice was no longer playing. It was a jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity" (53).
The dichotomy in this essay is not between flamenco and deep song, but between duende and the shallow art that emanates from heartless, bloodless skill.
Lorca does connect duende with some types of religious feeling in this essay. However, the religiosity is grounded and dramatic, not at all transcendental. And, I wonder if Mackey makes much use of this aspect of Lorca's theory.
"Song of the Andoumboulou 17" begins with a direct quotation from this essay: "the rim of the well." Here is the wider context:
"The Duende, on the other hand, will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death, if he is not convinced he will circle death's house, if there is not every assurance he can rustle the branches borne aloft by us all, that neither have, nor may ever have, the power to console.
With idea, with sound, or with gesture, the Duende chooses the brim of the well for his open struggle with the creator. Angel and Muse escape in the violin or in musical measure, but the Duende draws blood, and in the healing of the wound that never quite closes, all that is unprecedented and invented in a man's work has its origin.
The magical virtue of poetry lies in the fact that it is always empowered with duende to baptize in dark water all those who behold it, because with duende, loving and understanding are simpler, there is always the certainty of being loved and being understood; and this struggle for expression and for the communication of expression acquires at times, in poetry, finite characters."
Loving and understanding are simpler with the duende only because of the ongoing struggle with it. And this struggle is of darkness, blackness, from the earth — loam.
Towards the end of the speech Lorca makes a nationalist plea for duende. He claimes that bullfighting is the ultimate struggle with duende, and that virtually all of Spain's important artists have encountered duende. He ends by once again distinguishing duende from the muse and from the angel.
"The Muse keeps silent; she may wear the tunic of little folds, or great cow-eyes gazing towards Pompeii, or the monstrous, four-featured nose with which her great painter, Picasso, has painted her. The Angel may be stirring the hair of Antonello da Messina, the tunic of Lippi, and the violin of Masolino or Rousseau.
But the Duende - where is the Duende ? Through the empty arch enters a mental air blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unfamiliar accents; an air bearing the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things."
The duende is almost diabolical. It never ends, is restless, is immanent in the material process of things, a process that takes baptism from the church and places it in this immanent realm of endless creation, where baptism touches each new thing not with transcendence but with the dirt, loam, the struggles, and the complications.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Mackey's use of Lorca: The feeling of Duende
[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.
Mackey focuses less on the "Deep Song" essay of Lorca's and more on "Play and Theory of the Duende," which was published in The Poetics of the New American Poetry. A great Andalusian singer, Manuel Torre, claims that "'all that has black sounds has Duende.' These 'black sounds' are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art." (In Search of Duende, New Directions, 1998.)
Tomorrow I will discuss Mackey's specific take on duende. But here, I think we can use Torre's claims to identify one of the most original contributions Mackey has made to contemporary poetry.
He is writing a poetry of immanentist reflection.
Immanentism, as I am using it, is a metaphysical term meaning radically within, and is generally contrasted with a metaphysic that asserts there is another, transcendental realm.
Most reflective poetry in the Western tradition has been transcendental. It has used the iambic pentameter line (or a close equivalent) to discuss experience from an authoratative place separate from it. (Think Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach.") The feeling I get from all of Wallace Stevens' major reflective poems is that he is taking an outside view, he is the observer. It follows, then, that Stevens must allow for some sort of transcendence that allows him this outside perspective to reflect as he does.
For Mackey, there is no transcendence.
This claim may seem crazy when applied to a poet so interested in religion. However, his verse is concerned with moving through "the roots fastened in the mire," and is a reflection on that movement. That is one of the reasons Mackey is so hard to pin down: in the immanent realm, all is qualified, all is mitigated. A direct approach to understanding will only cover over "the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art."
Lorca describes the muse "as distant and so tired." Distant. This smacks of transcendence.
If Mackey does not allow for this transcendence to complicate his notion of immanence, what does he use?
The answer is borders. Mackey is consistently interested in the culturally excluded or ignored: The Dogon, African-Americans, Andalusians and their disparaged music, the heretical Gnostics, heterodox islamic mystics.
A relationship with an angel or muse is infinitely easier than a relationship with the duende: "The true fight is with the duende," insists Lorca.
In the metaphysics of immanence, their is no escape. Any attempt to escape only lands you in the complications of cross-cultural contact, because there is always a border. I have earlier described border as a good word to use in considering Mackey's cross cultural poetics because a border is not absolute — it is not a wide fissure — and the feeling of "crossing a border" is often not rigid and plays over a stretch of land on either side of the demarcation line.
For instance, going from California into Tia Juana would give us a feel of being in border territory, but 250 miles into Mexico and this feeling of border would evaporate, and we would need to come to terms with the specifics of Mexican culture.
It is also important to note that 250 and 500 miles and so forth into Mexico are other Mexican /American borders, ones that ring resort areas. Similarly, for Mexicans there are neighborhoods in almost every American city where a sense of border would come into play.
We are in the immantist world of misdirection, nuance, mitigation, and projection.
It can never come to us whole.
[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.
Mackey focuses less on the "Deep Song" essay of Lorca's and more on "Play and Theory of the Duende," which was published in The Poetics of the New American Poetry. A great Andalusian singer, Manuel Torre, claims that "'all that has black sounds has Duende.' These 'black sounds' are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art." (In Search of Duende, New Directions, 1998.)
Tomorrow I will discuss Mackey's specific take on duende. But here, I think we can use Torre's claims to identify one of the most original contributions Mackey has made to contemporary poetry.
He is writing a poetry of immanentist reflection.
Immanentism, as I am using it, is a metaphysical term meaning radically within, and is generally contrasted with a metaphysic that asserts there is another, transcendental realm.
Most reflective poetry in the Western tradition has been transcendental. It has used the iambic pentameter line (or a close equivalent) to discuss experience from an authoratative place separate from it. (Think Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach.") The feeling I get from all of Wallace Stevens' major reflective poems is that he is taking an outside view, he is the observer. It follows, then, that Stevens must allow for some sort of transcendence that allows him this outside perspective to reflect as he does.
For Mackey, there is no transcendence.
This claim may seem crazy when applied to a poet so interested in religion. However, his verse is concerned with moving through "the roots fastened in the mire," and is a reflection on that movement. That is one of the reasons Mackey is so hard to pin down: in the immanent realm, all is qualified, all is mitigated. A direct approach to understanding will only cover over "the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art."
Lorca describes the muse "as distant and so tired." Distant. This smacks of transcendence.
If Mackey does not allow for this transcendence to complicate his notion of immanence, what does he use?
The answer is borders. Mackey is consistently interested in the culturally excluded or ignored: The Dogon, African-Americans, Andalusians and their disparaged music, the heretical Gnostics, heterodox islamic mystics.
A relationship with an angel or muse is infinitely easier than a relationship with the duende: "The true fight is with the duende," insists Lorca.
In the metaphysics of immanence, their is no escape. Any attempt to escape only lands you in the complications of cross-cultural contact, because there is always a border. I have earlier described border as a good word to use in considering Mackey's cross cultural poetics because a border is not absolute — it is not a wide fissure — and the feeling of "crossing a border" is often not rigid and plays over a stretch of land on either side of the demarcation line.
For instance, going from California into Tia Juana would give us a feel of being in border territory, but 250 miles into Mexico and this feeling of border would evaporate, and we would need to come to terms with the specifics of Mexican culture.
It is also important to note that 250 and 500 miles and so forth into Mexico are other Mexican /American borders, ones that ring resort areas. Similarly, for Mexicans there are neighborhoods in almost every American city where a sense of border would come into play.
We are in the immantist world of misdirection, nuance, mitigation, and projection.
It can never come to us whole.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Mackey's relationship to "Deep Song"
[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.]
[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.]
Because the early poems in Whatsaid Serif are so indebted to Lorca's notion of Andalusian "Deep Song," it seems imperative to return to his ideas. I will sketch out Frederico Lorca's comments on it today, then look more closely at them tomorrow, in addition to working with Mackey's essay on the topic, "Cante Moro."
Frederico Garcia Lorca was fascinated by a type of folk song native to the Andalusian region of Spain. Called "Cante Jondo," or "deep song."
A handy New Directions Press book from 1998, In Search of Duende, gathers Lorca's essays and speeches on this subject. In the first essay, "Deep Song," Lorca makes a sharp distinction between the Cante Jondo and the better known flamenco.
The Andalusian folk songs are primitive and filled with simple truth. They resulted from the combining of original, pre-deep song Andalusian music with gypsy musical tendencies, after the travelers had arrived.
The "deep songs" are also maligned, considered debauched and dirty -- in a way similar to the blues in the U.S.A. context?
Meanwhile, Flemenco is considered Spanish, not Andalusian, and it is a celebrated, civilized derivation of the more true and primitive folk songs.
It is important to see that Lorca is not creating a simple dichotomy and lauding one half of it. He hardly sees the "deep songs" as culturally pure — rather, they are an accident of history, the result of various musics coming together because peoples came together.
However, this accident has created a cultural form with a unique ability to confront the largest issues of life with a directness and simplicity that creates overwhelming awe and almost unendurable intensity.
Lorca notes some great European musicians, most notably Debussy, who have commented favorably on the "Cante Jondo" and even incorporated some of its aspects into some music.
Tomorrow, on to how Mackey makes use of Lorca.
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