I FINALLY GOT BACK IN

After months of trying, I finally broke back into this blog. Thank goodness! While this has been lying dormant and useless, a number of you wrote gracious comments I couldn't respond to--I didn't even know they existed. I respond to each and every one below.


Also, I have started a new blog somewhat in the spirit of this one: Thealteredscale.blogspot.com. This blog will go dormant, and I will repost some of what appears here at the new one.


It is associated with my new Internet journal, Altered Scale. 


Altered Scale contains videos by 
Purgatory Hill, led by Grammy-nominated Pat MacDonald; 
National Book Award Winner Nathaniel Mackey; 
an improvised piece by Charles Bernstein, U of PA Donald T. Regan Professor;
Nicole Peyrafitte, performance artist and chef;
Chris Funkhouser and his group grope uSurp;
Vernon Frazer,
and the Zacc Harris Jazz Band. 


All videos, and everything else in the journal, is used with the permission of the artist.


Also in the journal are 


Maria Damon—poet, scholar, U of MN Professor

Jonathan Brannen—poet & songwriter

Ann Bogle—fiction writer

John Colburn—fiction writer, poet, publisher

Elizabeth Burns—author of the novel Tilt

Terry Folz—poet

Greg Hewett—poet & Carleton College Professor

Sun Yung Shin—Asian American Literary Award winner for poetry

Sarah Fox—poet & publisher

Nate McCay—poet & reading series curator

Mark Wallace—author of The Quarry and the Lot

Wang Ping—poet, fiction writer, photographer, MN Book Award Winner

Oscar Sparrow—English performance poet

Chris Funkhouser—NJIT Professor

I am getting a little tired of typing names, so here are the rest without the little bios (no offense intended)

Larissa Shmailo, Sheila E. Murphy, Grant Grays, Peter Ganick, Felino A. Soriano, Terry Folz, Hoa Nguyen, Greg Hewett, Sun Yung Shin, Bruce Holsapple, Sara Brickner, Geoffrey Gatza, Jill Chan, Nate McCay, Gail Lukasik, Heather Fuller, Colin James

Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou 26 (Post 2)

(See below for the first post on this poem.)

This is a decidedly dramatic, narrative poem that nevertheless buries it's story. Before getting to some of the poem's myriad subtleties, it would help to identify some of the broad outlines of the narrative. I am taking some liberties here, but this is what I see as the basis of what is going on.

1. We begin with the narrator and at least one companion traveling. They come to a valley, but the closer they get to it the more it becomes clear that it is a precipice with exposed rock stratum.

2.One of the traveler's keeps uttering a pessimistic phrase, apparently having received a great, gaping psychic wound.

3. The first section ends with a sort of religious rite, with altars, horns, flutes, and drums. This seems to be the conclusion of that: "Edge be my birthright." The ritual reveals that we are all always already at the precipice, on the edge of time, on the edge of one culture relative to another, and in our decisions creating an ever changing culture.

4. The next stanza begins halfway down the next page and below a horizontal line, meaning that it has the status of both a stanza and a poem within a poem. Again, they are traveling. Apparently, on a rope bridge beyond a ledge and across a gorge. It creates vertigo. The word "home" becomes relative, and seems to be only the ledge at the other end of the bridge. Is there no "home" in this radical fluidity and dynamism?

5. Next, they are apparently traveling on the ocean and washed up on Lone Shore. Apparently, the coast was supposed to be the place of the utopic city Zar. Instead, it was the apparent site of a massacre: "stripped limbs / catching / late October / light." The stanza also repeats words such as "again" and "rebegan," emphasizing how often such actions occur.

6. The next section is quite difficult to get a hold of. A ta'wil is an explanation or interpretation of the Qar'an. Above the mention of this are the images — champagne, roses, grapes — associated with the image of the altar in section three. Somehow, this interpretation seems to leave the people in the poem bereft and "twinless," twins being important to the spiritual beliefs of the Dogon. It is important to note that in this place there is an image of a book with blank, watery pages.

7. We are back on Lone Coast and beginning to bid the senses goodbye. They hold a hollow head to his ear. Most of the rest of this stanza focuses on how listening through the shell connects him to nature but divides him from people, who for the first time he refers to as "they." They seem to climb a precipice to the land of low branches, which Mackey seems to figure a little more positively than the damp beach. Here, the "book is drawn in flammable ink," and it ends by emphasizing the book of undone. Nonetheless, the dry underbrush scratches the bare skin.

8. This is another poem-within-a-poem. First it says that they now go by "two new names, / Hummed Outer Meat" and "Hollowness." Then it describes a nasty tale rehearsed by the sea shell he is still listening to. It is a meeting described by a lot ob abusive-sounding verbs.

9. It ends with three people separating. Two people run toward Loquat Cove, and the narrator runs by himself away from it. Then an earthquake intervenes, and the "whistling / fissure" seems to cause everyone to stop their running.

My next post will be more interpretive

Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou 26

[After about a six-month break, I have decided to return to this continuing series of posts that 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.]

[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.].

Allusions / Definitions
>This poem is the first of a group of ten that go under the heading "stra." I am not sure what Mackey is referring to. It could be a simple anagram for "star." It could also be the name for "sîra," what seems to be an Arabic name for a story that is part of a larger saga. Maybe it will come clearer later.

>Ra — Egyptian sun god

>Raz — unsure. Certainly negative relative to the majesty of Ra.

>C'rib — seems to be the proper noun for the blow he suffered to the back of the head.

>Zar — Religious ceremony in the Sudan and Southern Egypt conducted by women and intended to cast out demons.
>Loquat leaves — In China and Japan, special healing qualities are attributed to these

>Profligate — wildly licentious

> Ta'wil— explanation, interpretation, esp. of Qur'an.

>twin / twinless — In Dogon cosmology, according to the anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, twins are important in their creation myth. [See here. After you get to the page, click on the html given about half way down.]

>gremlin — Created in the Royal Air Force during World War II, this is a mischievous folk figure who causes trouble with planes and aeronautics.

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Before jumping into a discussion of the poem proper, I want to address the experience of reading it. It can be frustrating.

On the one hand, Mackey writes with enough power, authority, and narrative momentum to create a desire for knowing what is going on. On the other hand, he does not provide enough information for figuring this out. So we are left with the sense that something mysterious is happening, but we cannot get to the bottom of it.

No matter how many allusions we track down, no matter how much unusual diction we make clear, we will remain ill at ease.

Obviously, frustrating the reader cannot be the goal of these poems. So we must look elsewhere than traditional notions of how a poem is held together. I will need to formulate this more carefully later, but Mackey seems to be aimed at the reading process itself, at the coming to fruition of a sense, and insight, a togetherness, only to watch it dissipate.

Other poets have done this sort of thing: Ashbery, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejininian and so on. What sets Mackey apart is that he does this in a cross-cultural arena. In a way, he ups the stakes: with him, we are not just learning how to read complex poetry, we are learning how to read each other in our cultural differences, in what Mackey would call the difficult creakiness that attends all communication, both intra- and inter- cultural.

My next post on Mackey will consider #26 more particularly. At a later date, I will consider how he specifically contributes to contemporary poetry.

Homi Bhabha - The Location of Culture

Those of you who have been following this blog for a time know that I posted regularly on Nathaniel Mackey's poetry series "Song of the Andoumboulou" until about four months ago. I am going to begin discussing this series again soon, but I seem to be taking a bit of a detour. I find that Homi Bhabha in his theorizing about culture hits upon many of the thoughts, themes, and insights that Mackey has been exploring for the last 30 years. Bringing them together seems like a fascinating idea. I will read Bhabha through Mackey, and vice versa. Where one stops and the other begins may sometimes be obscured, but that is the way both men conceive of culture: its fluidity prevents any solidified or calcified identity formation.

Bhabha begins his book in a curious fashion: he discusses his autobiography. He was born and raised in Bombay as a middle class Parsi — "a member of a small Zoroastrian-Persian minority in a predominantly Hindu ad Muslim context. Years later, I ask myself what it would be like to live without the unresolved tensions between cultures and countries that have become the narrative of my life, and the defining characteristic of my work" (x).

Later in the Preface he distinguishes between two types of discourses of globalization. One is multiculturalism and it believes, implicitly or explicitly, in the essential differences of cultures and nations, and works to represent each in as fair and equal a manner as possible. Bhabha adds, sarcastically, "so long as they produce healthy profit margins."

The second one Bhabha terms a "vernacular cosmopolitanism which measures global progress from the minoritarian perspective." It "takes the view that the commitment to a 'right to difference in equality' as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmation or authentication of origins and 'identities' and more to do with political practices and ethical choices...It represents a political process that works towards the goals of democratic rule, rather than simply acknowledging already constituted 'marginal' political entities or identities" (xviii).

The essentialist believes that differences are the result of separate origins and essences that need to be respected and retained. This ends, according to Bhabha, in social inequality. If people are conceived of as different, then there are easy excuses for explaining why they do not share in a country's wealth. Vernacular cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, assumes that all cultural formations and identities are always already morphing and changing. There are no 'origins' to return to because the contemporary minoritarian cultures are responding to current political situations, even if they consider themselves to be retaining a past purity. Better to work toward a shared goal of "difference in equality" than the politically unpalatable multiculturalism and its belief in stagnant cultural identities.

In the introduction, Bhabha elaborates on his dynamic view of cultures by emphasizing that they are performative, always in the making. He also emphasizes that these performances take place in liminal places, in gaps and boundaries between ethnocentric, often colonial powers, and minoritarian ones. They can also take place among and between various minoritarian cultures. For Bhabha, the center is precisely where the least important and exciting cultural performances are taking place: he prefers "intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence" (12).

The moment of performance is an "unhomely" one, haunted and uneasy. That is because it is moving out into the previously never articulated or experienced, and attempting an articulation. In doing so the work of art moves the culture ever so slightly. What was previously unsayable becomes sayable, and it provides links and bridges to what had previously seemed other. Unhomeliness is not the feeling of being bereft outside your culture with nothing else to hold onto, it is the feeling of being outside your culture with the possibility of forging something between cultures while being in dialogue with the past.

It is important to note that artists are not in complete control of this whole event. They may initiate the action, but they cannot control the outcome. How cultures respond to the new artistic performance is, perhaps (and here I am speculating), part of the unhomeliness of the working artist; it is part of the estrangement.

As an aside, what most impressed me about Bhabha in these early portions of the book, is the evident respect he has for writers and visual artists. Bhabha is not a critic who puts himself above artists, who feels he can translate what they were really doing. He mentions how reading Naipul taught him some things that he used to develop theory. He did this by reading against the grain of Naipul's conservativism, but reading his novels got him thinking in valuable ways. He also displays tremendous respect for Toni Morrison and, surprisingly perhaps, Henry James.

This is in keeping with the way I view Mackey's "Song of the Andoumboulou": it is also culturally heterogeneous, also full of fluidity and skeptical of returning to a pure past, and it is highly respectful of musicians, in addition to writers. What's interesting is that Mackey was, I think, broaching these topics 20 years before Bhabha. I would not be surprised if Bhabha himself agrees that theory often comes late, that the unhomeliness felt by artists is part and parcel of their opening cultural locations that can later be theorized.

More later.

Nathaniel Mackey's "Strick" Poems

[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 four 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.]

Nathaniel Mackey, within his larger poetic series, Song of the Andoumboulou, entitles a sub-series of poems "Strick." They are Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25.

“Strick” is a word for various types of fibers that can be woven into rope, clothing, ship’s sails, any number of things.

Why might Mackey have given this series of poems, appearing within a larger series, this name?

Mackey himself uses the word “weaving” to describe his poetry. He does this in relation to what is referred to as the "creaking of the loom" in Dogon culture, which is a metaphor for language, cross-culturality, and anti-foundationism more generally. The creaking of the loom is "the noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation, of the purchase upon the world fabrication affords. Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. In its anti-foundational acknowledgment of founding noise, discrepant engagement sings "bass," voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend" (Discrepant Engagement 19).

Fibers are first raw, and single. Then they are woven through creaking of the loom. At the other end the fibers are again loose.

The act of reading poems in “Strick” is the weaving and woven fibers: on either side of the loom the fibers are singular and merely bundled.

This raises an immediate question: if the “Song of the Andoumboulou” poems before the “Strick” poems are like a bunch of fibers, how could they be poems, which, according to the metaphor, are woven?

Weaving involves creaking: imagine how a wind finds its way through the fibers in a woven sweater. Poems breathe. In addition, woven fibers break down, so that as we move on in reading, the former poems can give way and be reformed both in our memories and in the unfolding of the poems' concerns and obsessions.

“Song of the Andoumboulou” is both a poem of a lifetime, and forever breaking down and beginning anew.

This is borne out in the form. While the parts of all poems are dependent and independent of each other, Mackey makes more use of this interconnection, this weaving, this pourousness.

The “Strick” poems as a whole are both dependent on and independent of the other poems in "Song of the Andoumboulou." The individual poems in “Strick” are both dependent on and independent of the other poems. The sections of the poems, separated by dots and horizontal lines, are both dependent and independent of each other. The stanzas are both independent from and dependent on each other: and so are the very lines of the poem.

See this Mackey poem: Andoumboulou 21. This is a part of “Strick."

Notice this stanza break btween "outside..." and "It was a train." In these ways it is a standard break: 1) it skips a line; 2) there is a change in focus, from the scenery to the setting on a train.

In these ways it is not a typical stanza break. 1) The word "outside," followed by an ellipse, is a wisp of a line — indented, one word, the ellipse signaling us to slow down or that something is missing. The first stanza closes quietly with it.

2) The second stanza retains this wispiness by being in the passive tense, but it is also more of a specific statement of fact rather than impressions. The indentation further breaks it from the short line above.

Mackey's stanzas often draw to a close in this way. In addition, even inside his stanzas, as you can see in this poem, he will place single words toward the right margin, creating quasi-stanzas.

This is the essential point: even in most avant-garde poems, the edges and distinctions between formal elements are quite distinct. A series of poems is a series of poems. Think of Oppen's Discrete Series. A stanza is a block of lines. A line break is where the poet absolutely chooses to break the line: there is no such thing as a partially broken line.

Mackey breaks this rigidity down. Sup-series can be in poetic series. Poems coming right after one another can sometimes be quite distinct, and sometimes seem like a continuation.
Sections of the poem are divided by dots or horizontal lines. Stanzas, as we have seen, may or may not be located where he places a single word way on the right margin. Even the lines do not always have a clear beginning and end. How are we to read the indentations?

The result is that Mackey increases the number of formal techniques he can use, and he frequently uses them to smooth out the surface of the poem. It is as if he is playing with a 12-string rather than a 6-string.

The poems seem to glide into and out of jarring, creaking, cultural and semantic areas.

As we undulate down the lines and stanzas of Mackey's poems, the line and stanza breaks are both there and not there. Does the fifth line of Anoumboulou 21 end with or "eternity" or "minha"? The opportunities for subtlety, nuance, and stress increase tremendously with his use of these softening techniques.

This is Bedouin poetics.

I am “allowed” to use this term because Mackey himself brings it up when he names one of his books School of Udhru.

Undulating movement into and out of forms, into new forms, only to have them dissolve. Unwoven strands on either end of the creaking loom, woven strands tight together, but not fused, later, after use, to be unwoven.

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The next step is to follow some of these strands through Strick poems so that we can get a better feel for how they work out in particular. Initially, I will see if using a concordance will help me to read across the poems rather than down them, as I have been doing.

Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou 23-25

[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.]

These three poems are the final ones in a sub-series within the Songs of the Adoumboulou that is entitled "Strick." I will discuss this series as a whole in my next post on Mackey. For now, I will just focus on these three poems.

Allusions
Wings of a Dove — Could he be referring to the classic country song by this title, written by Ferlin Husky? It is a Christian song that makes reference to Noah.

Bamako — Capital and largest city in Mali.

The Station Hotel — Attached to this hotel in Bamaka are the passenger railway yard and a bar where traditional and contemporary Mali muscians performed.

Cerno Bokar — "Tierno Bokar (1875–1939) was a Sufi sage, a member of a distinguished clan, and a spiritual leader in his village in Mali. His clan, exponents of repeating a Sufi prayer 12 times, was embroiled in a debate with a rival clan that advocated repeating it 11 times, a debate that devolved into a conflict over power and leadership in the Tidjani Sufi Order. When Tierno eventually became a follower of Hamallah, a member of the rival clan, he was cast out by family, relatives and clan, branded a traitor, and forbidden to teach or pray publicly. His enemies further ostracized him by collaborating with the colonial powers, portraying him as a fomenter of rebellion against French rule. Tierno died impoverished and isolated."

Nyamkala — "The Mande people are very magical in nature. This can be mostly attributed to the nyamakalaw subgroup; an endogamous people who are born with the inherent ability to control nature. The power they are able to wield so well is called nyama. In fact, their name nyama-kala could be translated as handlers (kala) of nyama. The Mande see nyama as a hot, wild energy that is the animating force of nature. Nyama is present in all the rocks, trees, people and animals that inhabit the Earth. It is similar to the Western notion of the soul but is more complete than that. It controls nature, the stars and the motions of the sea. Nyama is truly the sculptor of the universe..."

See also, "a Nyamkala griot [is] a highly trained musician whose traditional job is to carry the knowledge of the people from person to person and generation to generation. He sees himself in direct opposition to the more popular notion of a griot as a popular storyteller and praise singer, or as a street musician and beggar, both images that have come to be common throughout West Africa

Shaykh Hamallah — Cerno Bokar became a follower of this Sufi master, thereby alienating his people.

Gassire's Lute — A West African folktale. This is a translation by Marcus Garvey. There are others.

Salif Keita — "Salif Keita is an internationally recognized Afro-Pop singer and song writer from Mali. He is unique not only because of his reputation as the Golden Voice of Africa, but because he is an albino and a direct descendant of the founder of the Mali Empire, Sundiata Keita. Keita was born on August 25, 1949 in the city of Djoliba. He was outcast by his family and ostracized by the community because he was an albino, a sign of bad luck in Mandinka culture. He left Djoliba for Bamako in 1967, where he joined the government sponsored Super Rail Band de Bamako."

Djelimady Tounkara — "Djelimady Tounkara is one of the foremost guitarists in Africa. Born in the culturally rich town of Kita, east of the Malian capital, Bamako, Djelimady grew up surrounded with traditional music played by members of his family. The Tounkaras are griots, musicians and historians by birth. Djelimady played djembe drum and ngoni, a banjo-like lute, as a boy. When he moved to Mali's capital, Bamako, during the 1960s, he had actually planned to work as a tailor. But music proved a stronger calling. He started playing guitar in a large, government-sponsored neighborhood band, Orchestre Misira. Voted the best guitarist in the band, Djelimady was selected to join the Orchestre National as rhythm guitarist, a great honor for the young player. The band's solo guitarist in those days was multi-instrumentalist Keletigui Diabate, who is known today as one of the most accomplished balaphone players in West Africa. Djelimady established himself early on as a guitarist capable of evoking the griot's three major traditional instruments--the ngoni, the balaphone, and the kora--on guitar. From the first time he performed solo on the national radio station, his mastery of tradition and his innovative approach to the guitar were evident to all...."

Soumagoro — the Sorcerer King of Sosso

What-Sayer — In epigraph to the whole book What Said Serif, Ellen Basso is quoted from her book A Musical View of the Universe: "...The what-say may be someone who asked to be given the narrative [of a story] or the recipient of a story that exemplifies explanatory principles needing clarification..."

loquat — "A tree of moderate size, the loquat may reach 20 to 30 ft (6-9 in), has a rounded crown, short trunk, and woolly new twigs. The evergreen leaves, mostly whorled at the branch tips, are elliptical-lanceolate to obovate lanceolate, 5 to 12 in (12.5-30 cm) long and 3 to 4 in (7.5-10 cm) wide; dark-green and glossy on the upper surface, whitish-or rusty-hairy beneath, thick, stiff, with conspicuous parallel, oblique veins, each usually terminating at the margin in a short, prickly point. Sweetly fragrant flowers, borne in rusty-hairy, terminal panicles of 30 to 100 blooms, are white, 5-petalled, 1/2 to 3/4 in (1.25-2 cm) wide. The fruits, in clusters of 4 to 30, are oval, rounded or pear-shaped, 1 to 2 in (2.5-5 cm) long, with smooth or downy, yellow to orange, sometimes red-blushed, skin, and white, yellow or orange, succulent pulp, of sweet to subacid or acid flavor. There may be 1 to 10 seeds, though, ordinarily, only 3 to 5, dark-brown or light-brown, angular -ellipsoid, about 5/8 in (1.5 cm) long and 5/16 in (8 mm) thick."

djinn — "In Islam, the djinn are a race of spirit beings that can be good or evil. (Djinn, or jinn, is the origin of the more familiar word "genie" in English.) "

Raz — Perhaps an anagram for Zar — ""The purpose of the Zar ceremony is to cure mental illness through contact with the possessing spirits which cause maladies. Though there are several methods for dealing with psychological disturbance, the Zar is the last resort which is supposed to have powerful therapeutic effect for several kinds of ailments," writes John Kennedy in Nubian Ceremonial Life. "

Dadaoua — Both Jeff Gray and Megan Simpson in the Spring 2000 Callaloo claim that this is an anagram of ouadada, 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.Aaccording to Jeff Gray, ""Dadaoua," an anagrammatic "turning-around" of "Ouadada," echoes also the "real" ... The counterpart to the Ouadada / Dadaoua turn-around is precise here, ..."

A Night in Tunisia — Jazz standard, written by Dizzy Gillespie and with its roots in the bebop era.

Rasp — This is a word that Mackey frequently uses to refer to the friction of cross-cultural encounters, the creaks and nomadic tendencies in language, and the way the Dogon singers sound on "Song of the Andoumboulou" "Chant des Andoumboulou"("Song of the Andoumboulou")Dogon Song, from the album Le Rituel Funeraire (Songs Of The Living - The Funeral Rites) (5:29): MP3" to be found on the Mackey page of PennSound

Oub'da — from Jeff Gray - "Beyond the Letter": Identity, Song, and Strick ... "The a that troubles the spelling is a convention of the French prefixes established in Ouadada, Ouagadougou (often spelled Wagadougou), and Ouab'da."

Zar — This is all I could find: "a pagan religious custom, apparently originating in central Ethiopia during the eighteenth century, later spreading throughout East Africa and North Africa. Zār custom involves the possession of an individual (usually female) by a spirit. It is also practised in southern Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. A featured Musical instrument in the Zār ritual is the tanbura, a six-string Lyre which, like the Zār practice itself, exists in various forms in an area stretching from East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. Other instruments include the mangour, a leather belt sewn with many goat hooves, and various percussion instruments. The Zaar cult served as a refuge for women and effeminate men in conservative, Muslim-dominated Sudan.

Hurqalya — An important setting in the Ba'hai faith. "The Shaykhis believed, that between the physical world and the spiritual world, there exists an intermediary world called Hurqalya (from the Greek word Huvarkalya) or the world of archetypal images (Alame' Mithal). Everything in this world has its counterpart in the world of Hurqalya. Each individual being has two bodies - one of which exists in the physical world and one in Hurqalya. The occulted, but living Twelfth Imam and the cities of Jabulqa and Jabulsa, where he is supposed to live, all exist in the realm of Hurqalya. "

School of Udra — From the back of the Mackey book of poems of this title: "School of Udhra takes its title from the Bedouin poetic tradition associated with the seventh-century Arab poet Djamil, the Udhrite school of poets who, "when loving die." Bedouin tradition, however, is only one of the strands of world revery these poems have recourse to. They obey a "bedouin" impulse of their own-fugitive, moving on, nomadic"

"Hollow be my name" — Play on the line from the Christian lord's prayer, Hallowed by thy name. Mackey's phrase seems to echo Gnostic suspicion of the God of the Bible.

atavistic — The return of a trait or recurrence of previous behavior after a period of absence.

pa'l monte — "Vamanos Pa'l Monte" is the title of an early '70's recording by salsa star Eddie Palmieri. Is this what Mackey is referring to?

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In interviews Mackey makes clear that the sections of "The Songs of the Andoumboulou" are permeable: the end of one poem and the beginning of another signals something new, but it is rarely a break. Similarly, such permeable sections exist within poems. Sometimes Mackey will set off a section of a poem by a dot. Other times he goes to more extremes: he makes a page break, and then continues the poem under a horizontal line that appears some distance down on that page. There are definitely formal and thematic shifts that occur with this sectioning. But things reoccur as well. Click here to see an online poem at the Poetry Foundation website that uses these techniques.

Whatsaid Serif begins with a group of nine poems given the name "strick." Strick refers to hemp or another type of reed that is good for weaving and creating rope. More on this in a subsequent post.

The final three poems of the "Strick" series is what I will concern myself with today. They are "Song of the Andoumboulou 23-25."

Throughout "Strick" there is traveling: on railroad, on bus, on plane, on the underground railroad. We begin where we left off in Andoumboulou 22, on a bus. But here, while a 'cut', a song, plays on the boombox, we have a specific destination: The Station Hotel in Bamako, the capital and largest city in Mali.

Somehow, Mackey has a vision of Cerno Bokar climbing aboard the bus, and then transitions into his story (see above), and his difficulties when he became a disciple of Shaykh Hamallah. He sees the warring elevens and twelves jihading on the bus.
He continues the story as he moves to a new setting: the bar at the Station Hotel. In fact, the band there "reminded us" of this story of doctrinal splitting and betrayal.

After a dotted break, he describes Cerno Bokar coming aboard again and he "called / war the male muse." Bokar then seems to join up with a chorus of contemporary African musicians: Nyamakula flutes, Keita, Kante, Djelimady Tounkara.

Mackey earlier describes the musicians as "Souls in motion, conducive / to motion, too loosely / commected to be called a / band." Then he inserts Bokar's tale into the music, points out war as a "ruse" — punning on "muse," that "boast and belittlement" were tossed back and forth, that Tounkara's guitar is compared to Gassire's bloody lute, "Tenuous Kin we called / our would-be band, Atthic Ensemble."

How are we to take this violent music?

The answer, if we are to be given one, is not given immediately.

After a dotted break, we are back on a train, "hovering" between book and not book, what and not what, train and not train, ready and unready. Also, there is an unidentified character 'insisting a story lay behind the story," but the voice of the poem insists a story named "Ever After" is in front of where this is. What is certain? We are in an epistemological and narratological crisis. What is the character of this specific crisis?

After a dotted break, Mackey discusses a "Beginningless book" and a musician feeling "as if all want were in his holding / a note only a half-beat / longer." He is addressing desire: the way we can feel, in our artistic creations, that we almost got it just right. But this is delusion. The nature of desire is mutation, substitution, and frustration: it's object is so unnattainable that we should perhaps think of desire as simple somatic energy, without specific objects, but with signposts, with glintings, with wonderings: "no book of a / wished else."

How do we put this all together?

The first section begins by punning on "cut" as both a song on a record and the schism of Sufi's that Cerno Bokar was in the middle of. Music and violence are interwoven. This is continued in the second section, where contemporary African musicians are brought into contentious, bloody, dialogue with Cerno Bokar. The third introduces the notion of hovering between opposites, "people ever about to get ready, unready." This "ever" hovering between opposites I take as the endlessness of desire.

The fourth and final section emphasizes this endless of desire, "the where / we / thumbed" — perhaps an image of hitchhiking, but certainly an image of moving, of "thumbing through."

Music will not carry us to a pure state beyond desire and contention. No art will. No story will. We are where we are, and it will never end, even after we die discussions of us will continue amid the desire and contention.

"Andoumboulou 24" takes us back onto the bus. The passengers mus go into a field to pee. Then he writes of "The world's raw want, could it all have / been so compressed," bringing us back to the issue of desire. The desire turns graphically sexual when "one whom love set / wandering" performs a bloody form of cuninlingus.

Into this dangerous situation the what-sayer steps. I am a little confused about what happens next, but it seems that "we for / whom the word was long dead...woke up to a new life." This raw, bloody desire is perhaps what it takes to get to words, to get to language.

The next section of the poem comes after a dot. It tells an elliptical story of heterosexual lovers rnning from a city in ruins, mentions the 8,281,404th beating, "a tale / too inane to be told." This is, I think, the story of violence being banal, simple, and without meaning. Being beaten is being beaten. To say anything else is to offend the pain.

The next section of the poem begins on the next page and under a horizontal line. The violence continues: "boots / to the ribs, batons to the / back."

Sexual violence, created by desire, is brought into relation to political violence. In the last section, this violence is given a place name, Ouab'da, like Abu Ghraib. This is a disturbing poem: Mackey unflinchingly refuses to distinguish the violence of rough sex between what seems to be willing partners and political violence.

Could it be that the very violence of the sexuality opens their desire to the possibility of fresh language, to their "legs bent ready to / spring, hellbent on / heaven, / lit between themselves a star"? But this opening is politically suppressed because it cannot last, it is a "No-Such-Place."

Logicallhy, the fact of political suppression would suggest that, without human intervention, the freshness of language, heaven, and stars that results from intense sexuality, is possible. People, not metaphysical absolutes, decide to oppress the seers.

But I don't think Mackey is this optimistic. I don't think his poems give any sense of a shared, unitary human-ness. We will always be many, and the many cannot become united except by violence. If the many remain many, there will be contested lands and desires. Either way, violence of some sort is inevitable.

The epigram for number 25 reads — "zar" nth part —" The Zar is a religious ceremony described above. Apparently, he is referencing a an unknown part of the ceremony.

This time they are again on a train. The train is not making stops, and is apparently going to an unknown destination. The tone is ominous: "reich," "hitlist," "dismembered" and so on. The tone continues. It is a mournful poem.

Perhaps what is most important is its reference Hurqualya (see above.) In Ba'hai it is an intermidiate world. This puts me in the mind of the hovering he brought up a poem or two ago. It puts me in the mind of the Gnostics who believed the true gospel had to be discerned through the false one Christianity now uses.

In all these instances there is the recognition of slippage, creakiness, and even conflict.

I don't believe Mackey is a secular poet, but I do believe he is an immantist one: his poetry is stuck in the complexities, nuances, and sublties of the desiring, dynamic, evolving and revolving.

Nathaniel Mackey: Andoumboulou 21

[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 / Vocabulary
Paulinho —
minha primeira vez — Portuguese for "my first time"
loquat —
Såo Paulo —
Algeciras —
Djbai — See Mackey's Atet A.D. pages 111-112
Bittabai — See above
Quantam —
Strick —
Lag — I think he is using the verb, meaning "to fail to keep up," as a noun
Apse —
Aliquant —
Samba —

_________________________________________________________________________________

This poem seems to be a continuation of the previous one. Mackey allows for such readings because he says in interviews that the poems in Song of the Andoumboulou can be thought of as overlapping.

That said, we must ask what the effect is of making the break between the two poems where he does. I think it is rhythmic: while all of Mackey's poems look fairly similar on the page, the way they work out specifically can be quite distinct. In Song 20 toward the end, the words are placed in a highly vertical and tilted fashion. You will have to trust me on this, because this blog form will not allow me to do justice to a quotation. In addition, pounding allusion and repetition add to the momentum.

In 21, the feeling is much more horizontal, and more space is given within and between lines. It seems that the break between poems is used to slow us down and to get us to view the same series of events (the poem begins with the word "next") within a more relaxed rhythmic medium.

"Next a Brazilian cut" -- Thus the poem begins. Mackey is referring to a song, a "cut", on an album of the Braziliam percussionist and singer Paulinho. They are also still in a train: "loquat groves hurried by / outside ... in southern Spain." Nevertheless, the sound of the Brazilian's music means that Brazil is placed within Spain, the air of the train as much of the distantly recorded song as of the earth of Spain.

Attention then shifts to a train in Brazil, "a train / less of thought than of quantum / solace, quantum locale." I believe that Mackey is getting at the still not fully understaood physics term "action-at-a-distance." Physicists have observed causal connections between particles too far apart to have any sort of typical interaction. What Mackey seems to be offering is quantum poetics, a way of thinking about music and poetry and culture that is also quantum, not hampered by overly determined notions of locale.

Put another way — a youngster from Pulaski, WI today may very well know less about his town's legendary polka music than of Scandinavian death metal. Action at a distance.

This continues in the final stanza, which seems to represent Brazil at carnaval (and it doesn't matter if Mackey was 'actually' there — action at a distance): "crowds milling," "loco, lock-kneed samba," polyrhythmic remit." Mackey does not seem very positive about this event, emphasizing the "book of / it" more than the it.

Heidegger (a philosopher I have deep reservations about, but he is useful here) in the 60's wrote about how when he first saw pictures of earth from orbiting satellites, he felt that we had lost the earth forever. Granted, Heidegger's concept of "earth" was extremely complex, but ultimately his pronouncement must be seen as conservative. There was a right way to experience earth, it is forever in the past, and we have lost it. Nostalgia.

There seems to be a bit of that nostalgia in this poem. There is no home here. We are in a cultural situation where we are always on trains, not to escape slavery as we saw in poem 20, but because it is simply where we cannot help but be. The mood of this poem seems a little downcast about this complex cultural place.

But Mackey has other moods. Mackey does not stay with this conservative mood.

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

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

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.

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.

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.