Unveiling Expectancy: Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Duncan, and the Formation of Discrepant Subjectivity

'The Word,' said the old man, 'is in the sound of the block and the shuttle. The name of the block means "creaking of the word." Everybody understands what is meant by "the word" in that connection. It is interwoven with the threads: it fills the interstices in the fabric. . . . The weaver, he explained, sings as he throws the shuttle, and the sound of his voice enters into the warp, adding to and taking along with it the voice of the ancestors.

--Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli (73)

An art that subsists on evolution and alchemy acquires a concreteness of vision in its multi-pigmented arc that runs deeper and also wider than the scope of a realism that seems both naturally fated and blind to the mystery of reality. It incurs at times a terrifying weight and weightlessness to reflect a measure of human spirit of responsibility in the shock of past and future events. Alchemisation of elements may appear anthropomorphic, but its impulse is towards an exposure of partial natures that masquerade as a universe of total fact.

--Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space (71)

All the gathered
ache of our

severed selves

--Nathaniel Mackey, "Grisgris Dancer" (EW 17)

I

In the opening, untitled poem of his first collection, Eroding Witness (1984), Nathaniel Mackey offers a resonant site map of the thematic concerns and conceptual framework that have figured largely in all his work since. The poem in full reads:

    Waters
wet the
mouth. Salt
currents come
to where the
lips, thru
which the tongue
slips, part.

At the tongue's
tip the sting
of saltish
metal rocks
the wound. A
darkness there
like tar,
like bits of
drift at ocean's
edge. A slow

retreat of
waters beaten
back upon
themselves.

  An undertow
of whir im-
mersed in
    words. (3) ¹

With its focus on speech in potentia ("an undertow / of whir im- / mersed in / words"), bodily injury ("the sting / of saltish / metal"), and spatial drift ("A slow // retreat of / waters beaten / back upon / themselves."), this introductory poem serves as subtle envoi to Mackey's poetics of "discrepant engagement." As Mackey describes his use of this term in his book of critical essays bearing the same title:

Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing resonance, dissonance, noise, seeks to remain open to them. Its admission of resonances contends with resolution. It worries resolute boundary lines, resolute definitions, obeying a vibrational rather than a corpuscular sense of being. It is to be at odds with taxonomies and categorizations that obscure the fact of heterogeneity and mix. (DE 20)

Mackey's entertaining of the multiple vs. the singular, the body as "vibrational" rather than simply "corpuscular," the non-canonical vs. the categorizable, suggests ways in which Mackey's work risks marginality and heterodox procedures to honor and investigate what Michael Harper describes in his preface to Eroding Witness as "the sounds of a mythmaker-griot in the midst of ceremonial talk, the totems of incantation, the way to the source, the origins of power" (EW). While Harper's claims can seem extravagant by today's more provisional poetic vocabulary, his comments underscore the play of critical discernment and embodiment that is at the heart of Mackey's project in both the poetry and fiction he's been writing over the course of the last twenty years. To return to the already cited poem, Mackey's work suggests a visibly cross-cultural understanding of the locations and positions (cultural, historical, autobiographical) that underwrite any forward-looking project in the arts. Like his former friend and mentor, Robert Duncan, Mackey pursues a delicate balance between the "formally experimental" and the "formally conventional," solidly aligning himself with a poetics that risks cultural marginalization and a practice that "accents fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world" (DE 19).

I want to use the pages that follow as a space for discussion of Mackey...