Nathaniel Mackey

A new collection of works by a Whiting Writer's Award-winning poet is divided into three sections including "Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" and features two ongoing serial poems that have evolved throughout more than twenty years, such as a West African spirit song and an exploration of a lost "we" tribe. Original.

Splay Anthem

Paracritical Hinge is a collection of varied yet interrelated pieces highlighting Nathaniel Mackey’s multifaceted work as writer and critic. It embraces topics ranging from Walt Whitman’s interest in phrenology to the marginalization of African American experiential writing; from Kamau Brathwaite’s "calibanistic" language practices to Garc�a Lorca’s flamenco aesthetic of duende and its continuing repercussions; from H.D.’s desert measure and coastal way of knowing to the altered spatial disposition of Miles Davis’s trumpet sound; from Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War poetry to the emancipatory potential of collaborative practices; from serial poetics to diasporic syncretism; from the lyric poem’s present-day predicaments to gnosticism. Offering illuminating commentary on these and other artists including Amiri Baraka, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Wilson Harris, Jack Spicer, John Coltrane, Jay Wright, and Bob Kaufman, Paracritical Hinge also sheds light on Mackey’s own work as a poet, fiction writer, and editor.

Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews

Paracritical Hinge

A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel

Late Arcade

Poems deal with prophecy, music, magic, initiation, mythology, dreams, dance, secrets, death, and time

Poems

Eroding Witness

Nathaniel Mackey's sixth collection of poems, Blue Fasa, carries forward what the New Yorker has described as the "mythological conception" and "descriptive daring" of his two intertwined serial poems. A long song that's one and more than one, this collection takes its title from two related black musical traditions, a West African griot epic as told by the Fasa, a clan in ancient Ghana, and trumpeter Kenny Dorham's hard bop classic "Blue Bossa," influenced by the emergence of Brazilian bossa nova. The book opens with the catch of the heart and the call of romance, as it follows a band of travelers, refugees from history, on their incessant migrations through time, place, and polity toward a truer sense of being and belonging.

Blue Fasa

This highly regarded and frequently referenced work of literary criticism is essential to any study of avant garde poetics. Nathaniel Mackey addresses the poetry and prose of a number of authors not commonly grouped together: black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets. Although they are seemingly disparate, these writers are united by their experimentation with style and form. Mackey, an important contemporary poet and critic, focuses on the experimental aspects of their work rather than on its subject matter or authorship to show that they all share an implied critique of conventional poetic practices. Mackey analyzes the work of Black Mountain poets Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson, African American poets Amiri Baraka and Clarence Major, and Caribbean writers Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris. He frequently brings the work of these authors into dialogue and juxtaposition, noting the parallels and counterpoint that exist among writers normally separated by ethnic, temporal, or regional boundaries. By insisting that their experimentation unites these writers rather than marginalizes them, Mackey questions traditional notions that underlie conventional perceptions and practice. In his epilogue and bibliographic essay, volume editor Michael Conniff suggests new directions for further research and offers a comprehensive survey of the evolution of major writings, theories, and methodologies in the field.

Dissonance, Cross-culturality, and Experimental Writing

Discrepant Engagement

Kamau Brathwaite

Literary Criticism. African American and Caribbean Studies. Kamau Brathwiate's CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY is based on the transcript of his discussion with Nathaniel Mackey at Poet's House in New York City. Brathwaite expansively elaborates on Mackey's (and audience member's) knowledgeable inquiries; his answers are layered with subsequent ruminations arising from his lifelong engagement with world literature and expressive cultures. A multiphasic drift, CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY combines elements of biography and autobiography with poetic discourse on Caribbean literary history and negative effects of colonial domination. Brathwaite splices dialog with poetry, criticism, and instrictive imaginary voices in his now distinct and characteristic Sycorax 'video style' format. Both Brathwaite and Mackey have several titles carried by SPD. Mackey's ERODING WITNESS is newly available, along with WHATSAID SERIF (City Lights) and DJOBOT BAGHOSTUS'S RUN (Sun & Moon) Brathwaite's BLAC

Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey

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. Ogo the fox, the Dogon avatar of singleness and unrest, runs throughout, crossing and recrossing divided ground, primal isolate, insistent within the book's cross-cultural weave. The poems track variances of union and disunion- social, sexual, mystic, mythic- both formally and in their content. They return rhapsody to its root sense: stitching together. Threads ranging through ancient Egypt, shamanic Siberia, Rastafarian Jamaica, and elsewhere figure in, inflected by conjunctive and disjunctive cadences inspired by jazz, Gnaoua trance-chant, cante jondo, and other musics.

School of Udhra

On the eve of a 1982 L.A. jazz ensemble's latest album release, its members receive a mysterious otherworldly message that sparks a series of letters documenting subsequent life-changing events. By the National Book Award-winning author of Splay Anthem. Original.

Bass Cathedral

"A New Directions paperbook original"--P. [4] of cover.

From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate

Paracritical Hinge is a collection of varied yet interrelated pieces highlighting Nathaniel Mackey’s multifaceted work as writer and critic. It embraces topics ranging from Walt Whitman’s interest in phrenology to the marginalization of African American experimental writing; from Kamau Brathwaite’s “calibanistic” language practices to Federico García Lorca’s flamenco aesthetic of duende and its continuing repercussions; from H. D.’s desert measure and coastal way of knowing to the altered spatial disposition of Miles Davis’s trumpet sound; from Robert Duncan’s serial poetics to diasporic syncretism; from the lyric poem’s present-day predicaments to gnosticism. Offering illuminating commentary on these and other artists including Amiri Baraka, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Wilson Harris, Jack Spicer, John Coltrane, Jay Wright, and Bob Kaufman, Paracritical Hinge also sheds light on Mackey’s own work as a poet, fiction writer, and editor.

Essay, Talks, Notes, Interviews

Magdalena Zurawski

Poetry. Suite of five chapbooks published by Three Count Pour, made possible with the support of Duke University: Anuncio's Last Love Song by Nathaniel Mackey, Southern Colortype by J. Peter Moore, A History of Fire by Dianne Timblin, first the trees, now this by Ken Taylor, and [Distressed Properties] by Magdalena Zurawski.

5 by Three Count Pour

Durham Suite

A magisterial box set of three new books that advances the tradition of the long poem far into the twenty-first century with a "low-lit, slow-drag ebullience"

A Box Set

Double Trio: Tej Bet, So's Notice, Nerve Church

Art Lange

Gathers poems and prose selections about jazz by Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, Julio Cortazar, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara, Gregory Corso, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Ntozake Shange

Jazz in Poetry & Prose

Moment's Notice

Erica Mena

Anomalous Press

Outer Pradesh

Djbot Baghosthus's Run is the second volume of Mackey's ongoing epistolary fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Like the first volume, Bedouin Hornbook, this work is written by the composer/multi-instrumentalist N., a founding member of a jazz group known as the Mystic Horn Society. Djbot Baghosthus's Run is centered, in part, on the band's search for a new drummer. But this search, which begins with a revolution among the women of the group, and ends in a series of remarkable coincidences and eerie transcendental experiences, is also a search for everything that art (music and writing in this case) is and serves as an emblem for. Each letter spans an extraordinary range of voices and discourses, from philosophical to folkloric to erotic - with music always the connecting thread. Jazz for Mackey clearly is a cosmological and spiritual experience, on which signifies all those possibilities that lie beyond N.'s improvisations of a saxophone riff. At every level, intellectual, spiritual, sexual, and just plain gut, Djbot Baghosthus's Run is a masterwork of contemporary storytelling, a wonder that will haunt the emotions and arouse the intellect.

Djbot Baghostus's Run

Anuncio's Last Love Song

Nathaniel Ernest Mackey

Discrepant Engagement addresses work by black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets.

Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing

Chapbook. This set of four poems is taken from "Tej Bet", the book that will follow "Blue Fasa" (New Directions, 2015), extending the "Mu"/"Song of the Andoumboulou" thread to "Song of the Andoumboulou: 160"

Moment's Omen

Poetry. Reprint of Nathanial Mackey's first book of poetry, selected by Michael Harper in 1985 as a winner of the National Poetry Series, and published by University of Illinois Press. With a new preface by Joseph Donahue.

Nathaniel Mackey

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