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

Mackey: Vision and Reflection

Picking up on my thoughts from yesterday, Mackey is more a fast-moving poet who reflects on spiritual, cultural, and ecstatic matters than he is a spiritual or ecstatic poet. He seems also to be a visionary poet. Both visionaries and those who reflect do so from a position on the edge or outside. (Mackey in interviews often speaks of the edge.)

Take the example of Jayne Cortez. Especially in her live work with the Firespitters and other groups, her work has an immediacy that is necessary for both the spiritual and the ecstatic. Is it an absolute immediacy? Of course not. If that were the case it would be wide open to Derridean deconstruction. As Derrida points out, all language slips, but some slips more than others. Cortez typically is too intense and lacking in irony to create a lot of slippage relative to other poets.

Are intensity and a lack of irony sufficient reasons for a piece to be considered spiritual or ecstatic? I doubt it. But it seems to me they are necessary. Even the hilarious ancient Persian mystic Hafiz had an intensity about him.

Mackey is as interested in deferral, stammer, stutter, and slippage as he is with anything. Perhaps much of his work is not spiritual or ecstatic, but shows forth the stuttering and slippage that occurs with such language but often goes repressed or unnoticed.

Some examples from School of Udhra (I choose it because it is next to my keyboard. Any of his books would show the same sort of pattern):

"not yet asleep I'm no longer awake" (3) [Emphasis is on negation, not ecstasy.]

"Took the dust of an eroded footprint" (4) [Self-cancelling image.]

"at the mention of loss a new convert / to light" (6) [Speech engenders.]

"I sit up holding you a / year ago" (7) [Notice how the shift in tense creates slippage.]

"scorched earth looked at / with outside eyes" (9)

"disembodied voice" (10) [Notice how Mackey speaks of a disembodied voice rather than from one, which would be speaking from a state of ecstasy.]

This goes on throughout Songs of the Andoumboulou.

A note of caution: above I have analyzed thematic content. Mackey's form must also be addressed along these lines. I do so in the post before this one.

Paul Naylor in an excellent article in the Spring 2000 Callaloo seems to disagree with me. He references Heidegger as defining 'ecstasy' as standing outside of one's self in language. "The selves that inhabit the poetic terrain of SoA, are able to stand outside themselves...and it is language that is at once the condition for the possibility of such ecstasy and its site."

Now I don't want to nor claim to critique Naylor in a thorough manner, but I must say I disagree with him on this important point. Ecstasy is not the only way to get outside one's self in language. Reflection can do it as well. Vision is a third way. (By 'vision' I am not referring to a coherence that an artist works toward, but a construction by the artist that, while coherent in some senses, is also quite open. For a writers to have an 'artistic vision' in the most extreme manner would be the end of their writing.)

Naylor seems to argue that Mackey's poetry is the site of ecstasy. I believe that it is the site of reflecting on and constructing visions about, among other things, ecstasy.

A future post will need to consider the interrelationship between this reflection and vision building and Mackey's unique form.