Mackey's Song of the Andouboulou 27 (entry 2)

[This series of posts reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Song 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, in addition to the poems themselves, 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.]
The next section continues the images of alienation — "dreamt of lone coast" — but in a language more taught and punchy. The lines, filled with one or two syllable words, range between two and five words long (excluding the short one-word lines that frequently end stanzas.)

In the previous stanza we have lines filled with multi-syllabic words, and the lines are often a little bit longer. When we reach the end of the second section, the lines become quite short.

While Mackey's poems never stop dancing, this is as close as he comes to claustrophobia: "cut string caroling / world / relapse." The final section uses very short lines, goes by very quickly, is short, and returns us to worldly imagery and away from dream imagery. The persona in the poem, "the she" who would seem to be the female half of the original twins of the Dogon mythology. Punning, Mackey writes "'mu' more related / to miss than to myth."

A poem that pushes and pulls, formally, thematically, imagistically, and so on. It pushes towards embrace, sometimes violent, sometimes comforting, then pulls toward isolation at "Nudge." The poem is the process of reading it, one that leads us through a thicket of complications, "line blurring truth," emphasis on the adjective "blurring," so that truth itself is like a verb, always blurring, never clearing.

Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou 27

[This series of posts reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Song 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, in addition to the poems themselves, 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.]

Song of the Andoumboulou 27 immediately struck me as different from 26 in three ways: it is less broken up into subsections, the texture of the language feels tauter and rougher, and it describes less traveling.

The poem is divided into three parts: one is two pages long, one a page long, and the last about a half a page long. It begins with horrifying images of alienation told in a language ungraspable but all too evident: "Could / even feel the grain of his / back, whose hips would/ be hers were she her own to / remake..." This is one of many images of discomfort, "grain," coupled with powerlessness — "were she her own." She ends up on Loquat Cove, "also known as Nudge" — which seems an undeniably ugly word.

There she is connected with a man who may physically rape who, but who certainly does on an emotional level. He seems to leave in a space ship after the act. This is based on Mackey's reading of The Pale Fox by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. It states that in Dogon cosmology a trip to a distant, twin star is described. In an earlier post, I discussed some of the present controversy surrounding Griaule and Dieterlen's work in anthropology.

But what does this mean poetically? In Dogon cosmology the Andoumboulous are not particularly evident. They live in the earth and are small, considered a "rough draft" of humanity. The "Song of the Andoumboulou" is just a minor funeral song. Mackey has not gone after the most important aspects of Dogon belief. He has taken little slivers and slices, from the edges, from the margins. He believes that we humans are the Andoumboulous, in that we are the rough drafts, at the edges, in that we are always remaking ourselves.

This poem is always remaking itself as well.

I will work with other aspects of this poem tomorrow.

Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou 26 (Post 3)

(See below for first two posts.)

As with most of Mackey's poems, this is a poems of motion on the literal (traveling), figurative ("transcendent" planes) and allegorical (the buried narrative as a search for knowledge) level. What we see is that this search for knowledge takes place within fog, within the clamminess near the ocean, within thunderstorms, and in the brittle dryness of a low-branched forest.

It also begins by describing how what seems a valley turns into a precipice. It ends with the fissured earth after an earthquake.

Such is the sight and site of communication, miscommunication, writing and miswriting. The wet book and the burning book. The final fissure is the bass, the foundation, and the shaken frame, what makes possible the weaving in a Dogon loom. It is the instability that makes weaving, and language, possible. (Mackey discusses this in his essays.)

The bass itself is moving. Music works by setting up patterns and altering them.

The earth is moving.

"Stra" for "stratum"; "stra" for "stray."