"Beyond the Letter": Identity, Song, and Strick

"Surprisingly enough, twentieth-century advances in literary interpretation and musical analysis have done little to foster an interdisciplinary method. To put it bluntly, none exists." (4)

--Lawrence Kramer, Poetry and Music:
The Nineteenth Century and After

"sound their adamant recompense...."

--Song of the Andoumboulou #18

Nathaniel Mackey's compact disk recording Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25 (1995) is the continuation of his long open-ended poem Song of the Andoumboulou, installments of which have appeared in numerous journals and in two of his books, Eroding Witness (1985) and School of Udhra (1993). ¹ While alluding in its title to its inspiration, the West African Dogon "Song of the Andoumboulou," Strick is not itself a song--in fact, both its prosody and its "raspiness," to use Mackey's term, resist the transcendence we associate with song. ² It is instead a commentary on millennial poetic concerns for roots as well as for the linguistic detours, deferrals, and dead-ends of the root-seeking process; a struggle between the scribal and the oral, between signing and singing; an important inversion of our accustomed perception of music as formal and combinatory and literature as mimetic and referential; and a specimen of the inclusive "world poem"--with its precedents in Whitman, Pound, Williams, and Duncan.

Strick is also, most simply, the narrative of a journey across desert spaces, a journey in which layers of voices, histories, and melodies replace chronology as a way of organizing time. Musicians Royal Hartigan and Hafez Modirzadeh, multi-instrumentalists in world music and jazz, collaborated with Nathaniel Mackey in creating a work unique in its juxtapositions: on the one hand, contemporary jazz and traditional musics of Iran, India, China, the Philippines, and West Africa, and, on the other, an experimental poetic texture which, while it gestures toward roots, frustrates the comforts of rootedness.

Lawrence Kramer, in his book Poetry and Music: The Nineteenth Century and After, has written that, owing to the asymmetry in semiotic structure between literature and music, no interdisciplinary method exists that can fully engage both. Without pretending anything here in the way of a general contribution toward such a method, I would like to explore the ways in which words and music refer to each other in Strick, with particular attention to the referential qualities of music in a work of poetry concerned with versions of collective identity.

Nathaniel Mackey occupies a problematic place in contemporary poetry. An African-American poet whose influential essays on mid- to late-century African-American poetry--and, in a novel juxtaposition, Black Mountain poetry--are collected in his book Discrepant Engagement, his poetry is usually featured in anthologies of formally experimental, not identitarian work. Because such oppositions organize texts and contexts for reading, and because it matters where we find and read poetry, I note the following comment by Douglas Messerli, from his introduction to From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990, where Messerli explains that his principle for inclusion has nothing to do with subject position and everything to do with experimentation: "Poets of great talent whose writing has more to do with cultural, social, and political subjects than the more formally-conceived poems in this volume, must recognize the specific focus of this anthology." Given Mackey's presence in other anthologies of postmodern poetry, I take this remark, and this distinction, as representative.

And yet Mackey's work is almost obsessively concerned with subject position, particularly with the difficulty of locating a viable first-person plural identity. The travelling narrators of Strick frequently allude to the mythical site of an aboriginal collective, the lost "one we Ouadada" (#18), the "collective kiss we called Ouadada" (#20). If Mackey's poetry is also "identitarian," as I think it is, its shifting terrains, mythologies, and frames of reference complicate any settled sense of identity. Certainly, the texts of Strick are neither "experimental" in the sense of postmodern pastiche or sign surfing nor "identitarian" in the sense of...