An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey

Nathaniel Mackey won the National Book Award in 2006 for his poetry volume Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006) and a Guggenheim Award in 2010. A polymath, Mackey has published five chapbooks and five books of poetry; two critical works, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge, 2003) and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Wisconsin, 2005); and four volumes of epistolary fiction as installments in his ongoing project From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate (vols. 1-3, New Directions, 2010): Bedouin Hornbook (Callaloo, 1986; second edition, Sun & Moon, 1997); Djbot Baghostus's Run (Sun & Moon, 1993); Atet A.D. (City Lights, 2001); and Bass Cathedral (New Directions, 2008). Yet to categorize Mackey's work by genre is to belie the cross-fertilization among all of these endeavors as well as their cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-art experimentation.

Mackey's work is defined by his commitment to serial composition and improvisatory modes and draws inspiration from jazz and world music and from Black Mountain (or New American) and Caribbean writers. Turning to the projective and open field poetics of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan, Mackey wrote his 1975 Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford University on "open field poetics as muse." Finding early on in Amiri Baraka's poetry in The Dead Lecturer an example of a writing crossing between poetry and jazz, in a 1978 essay on Baraka, "The Changing Same," Mackey contested Baraka's own early disavowal of his experimental methods, while noting how Baraka himself connected avant-garde jazz with open field poetics. Mackey subsequently located an important inspiration, especially for his epistolary fiction, in the writing of the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, whose metanarratives reflect upon their own figuration in relationship to "the legacies of conquest in the Caribbean" (Discrepant Engagement 5). Mackey writes of Harris's attempt "to free the Caribbean of a reductionist historiography" through his "spectral or phantom remembering of a dismembered past" (165) that allows for "the possibility of fulfillment in the midst of presumed and even manifest deprivation" (169).

Mackey's work is usefully approached through his concept of "discrepant engagement," a coinage that served to spearhead a cross-arts colloquium, "Collaborative Dissonances: Jazz, Discrepancy, and Cultural Theory," at the Guelph Jazz Festival in Ontario, and the book Discrepant Abstraction (MIT, 2006), a collection that addresses "abstraction" in so-called third-world art, produced by the British-based Institute of International Visual Arts. In his introduction to Discrepant Engagement, Mackey discusses what he means by the term "discrepant engagement," drawing out its significance and implications:

It is an expression coined in reference to practices that, in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world. Such practices highlight—indeed inhabit—discrepancy, engage rather than seek to ignore it. Recalling the derivation of the word discrepant from a root meaning "to rattle, creak," I relate discrepant engagement to the name the Dogon of West Africa give their weaving block, . . . the "creaking of the word." It 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 . . . voice[s] reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend.

(19)

As a writing of dissonance, Mackey's poetry embraces a discordant set of sources and references and constructs "unlikely" spaces and musics. In an early poem, "Winged Abyss," dedicated to Olivier Messiaen and published in Eroding Witness (Illinois, 1986), Mackey writes:

A war camp quartet for the end of time    heard with ears whose time has yet to            begin . . .  An unlikely music I hear makes a world            breakbeyond its reach . . .

(91)

More recently, in "Anouman Sandrofia," from Nod House (New Directions, 2011), he composes

      Night's own embou-    chure. Night's nextet, we came outof nowhere, announcing and annulling the    end of all things. . . All...