Search results for ""Author Nathaniel Mackey""

Whatsaid Serif, Nathaniel Mackey's third book of poems, is comprised of installments sixteen through thirty-five of Song of the Andoumboulou, an ongoing serial work whose first fifteen installments appear in Eroding Witness and School of Udhra, his two previous books. Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and livid apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kakapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology, are "a rough draft of human being," that "the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft." The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration's putative angel itself. "Nathaniel Mackey's poem is a brilliant renewal of and experiment with the language of our spiritual condition and a measure of what poetry gives in trust - 'heat's/mean' and the rush of language to bear it." --Robin Blaser "Mackey's raspy rebus-like cultural resurfacings are both beautiful to read and worthy of repeated efforts at comprehension." --Publishers Weekly Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers' Award, is the author of School of Udhra and Atet A.D., both also published by City Lights Publishers. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006, was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2014, and won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2015. He teaches a poetry workshop at Duke University.

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For thirty-five years American poet Nathaniel Mackey has been writing a long poem of fugitive making like no other: two elegiac, intertwined serial poems—“Song of the Andoumboulou” and “Mu”—that follow a mysterious, migrant “we” through the rhythms and currents of the world with lyrical virtuosity and impassioned expectancy. In a note to this astonishing box set of new work, Mackey writes: “I turned sixty-five within a couple of months of beginning to write Double Trio and I was within a couple of months of turning seventy-one when I finished it.... It was a period of distress and precarity inside and outside both. During this period, a certain disposition or dispensation came upon me that I would characterize or sum up with the words all day music. It was a period during which I wanted never not to be thinking between poetry and music, poetry and the daily or the everyday, the everyday and the alter-everyday. Philosophically and technically, the work meant to be always pertaining to the relation of parts to one another and of parts to an evolving whole.” Structured in part after the last three movements of John Coltrane’s Meditations—“Love,” “Consequence,” and “Serenity”—Double Trio stretches the explorations and improvisations of free jazz into unprecedented poetic territory.

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Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal. Over the next nine months, N.’s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls “cowrie shell at- tacks”—oil spills, N.’s memory of his mother’s melancholy musical Sundays— which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention. Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the great American jazz novel of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (Bookforum).

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Atet A.D. is the third volume of Nathaniel Mackey's ongoing epistolary fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Like the first two volumes, Bedouin Hornbook and Djbot Baghostus's Run, this work is written by the composer/multi-instrumentalist N., a founding member of a band formerly known as the Mystic Horn Society. The letters in Atet A.D. span a seven-month period beginning shortly after Thelonious Monk's death and culminating in the band recording their first album on John Coltrane's birthday. Rendered in N.'s distinctive mix of discursive registers, they chronicle and meditate upon, among other events, Penguin's return from seclusion, N.'s recurring cowrie shell attacks, the band's adoption of a new name, and their being beset, beginning with a gig in Seattle, by a new, perplexing twist in their expressive powers. "As with all of Mackey's prose fiction, his hermeneutic speculations are advanced as much by the power of puns as by syllogistic reasoning. For all the wordplay, Mackey manages to cover a lot of ground in this neo-novel, which is not so much about "characters" as it is about ideas and themes like gender equality, the survival of African customs and spiritual values in America, and the play of dreams within our waking realities. Most idiosyncratically, Mackey, with his nuanced knowledge of jazz, convinces the reader that music operates like a language, with all the power to convey, say, a specific feminist critique of male-centered jazz culture, or to acquire levels of symbolism that would make Dante wonder if he should have taken up sax." -Publishers Weekly "Atet A.D. is a fascinating work of poetic/musical fiction-storytelling that plays with, and is inspired by, language and the mystical concepts and connections that arise unbidden from the manipulation of metaphor and meaning, while simultaneously fueled by the sounds and energy of American jazz which Mackey views as a source of spiritual and sexual discipline and discovery" -Art Lange, Pulse Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers' Award, is the author of School of Udhra and Whatsaid Serif, both also published by City Lights Publishers. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006, was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2014, and won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2015. He teaches a poetry workshop at Duke University.

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The great American jazz novel of “such exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (Bookforum) by National Book Award Winner Nathaniel Mackey.

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With Nathaniel Mackey’s fifth collection of poems, Nod House, we witness a confluence of music and meaning unprecedented in American poetry. Mackey’s art continues to push the envelope of what is possible to map and remap through words in sounds and sounds in words. Picking up with Nub’s disintegration at the end of his previous collection — the National Book Award–winning Splay Anthem — we follow a traveler and a tribe of travelers ensconced in myth and history as Mackey continues to weave his precisely measured music with two ongoing serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu. The collec- tion is divided into two sections, both titled “Quag,” and it is this double-Quag (“Nub’s new colony Quag” or Qraq or Ouab’da or Quaph . . .) that the tribe is exiled in, worlds within alternate worlds where names and places are ever-shifting, and dreamlessness reigns. From the pyramids to the projects, Ivory Coast to Lone Coast, Lagos to Stick City, amidst chorusing horns and star-spar lightning, Nod House (“Nub’s / new / address”) unfolds as gorgeous eulogy, copla-cuts of deep song, the long elegiac march of “day after day of the dead.”

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Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections—"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")—Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou"). In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. "Mu," too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.

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