The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

NATHANIEL MACKEY

Ø Nathaniel Mackey 378 like an unfingered guitar string, is beyond me. Maybe the hills grew weary & leaned a little in the heat. Again, thanks for the dud hand grenade tossed at my feet outside Chu Lai.3 I’m still falling through its silence. I don’t know why the intrepid sun touched the bayonet, but I know that something stood among those lost trees & moved only when I moved. 1988 During the Vietnam War, Yusef Komunyakaa served as a reporter and editor for the military newspaper The Southern Cross. “Thanks” reveals the dangers that military reporters faced at the warfront. It provides a bewildered, bleak, and pained perspective on the war. One might consider the speaker’s “thanks” as being directed toward God for permitting him to survive. Conversely, one might consider his thanks for random good fortune an indication that the speaker believes that God is absent or indifferent. The “blind gods” mentioned in the poem may be a version of that absent divinity, or they may be the American, Vietnamese, and Chinese leaders who authorized the war. You may wish to consider this poem in the context of other poems about the Vietnam War by Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Gerald McCarthy, W. D. Ehrhart, Ray A. Young Bear, and Bao-Long Chu. NATHANIEL MACKEY b. 1947 A poet influenced by jazz, nathaniel mackey creates improvised, rhythmic poems that evoke the sense of being far from home, on an immense journey from somewhere to somewhere else. His texts create dreamscapes of language, in which words are in close touch with their sounds, and in which AfricanAmerican characters are adrift in language, music, dreams, and history. In “On 3. Chu Lai means “harbor of big ships” in Vietnamese. It was a Marine Corps base from 1965 to 1971. On Antiphon Island Ø 379 Antiphon Island,” the characters dance on a ship whose origination point and destination are unclear. In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 51,” the speaker and his imaginary companions make an endless car trip through surreal landscapes. Mackey’s work reflects the inheritance of the “world poem” as written by such cross-cultural predecessors as Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley (the latter three included in this volume). Mackey is also associated with such African-American synthesizers of jazz and poetry as Melvin Tolson and Amiri Baraka (the latter included in this volume). Employing African, Caribbean, and African-American folkloric and musical traditions, Mackey provides a particularly challenging and rewarding instance of multiethnic avant-garde postmodernism at work. Matthew Lavery summarizes Mackey’s poetic aims: “Besides his fervent invocation of the necessity of cohering language, which cannot be seen as grounded in referentiality to anything ‘real,’ in some sort of other, ‘real’ artifice, there is his astute shaping of that artifice according to a device that coheres language’s multiplicity . . . , no less than the inevitability of this coherence resulting in political commentary.” Born in Florida, Mackey moved to California when he was four. He received his B.A. from Princeton and his Ph.D. in English from Stanford, where he wrote his dissertation on Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War poetry. He has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, since 1979. further reading Norman Finkelstein. “Nathaniel Mackey and the Unity of All Rites.” Contemporary Literature 49.1 (Spring 2008): 24–55. Alan Gilbert. “A Review of Splay Anthem.” Believer magazine (March 2007). www.believer mag.com/issues/200703/?read=review_mackey. Matthew Lavery. “The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou.” African American Review 38.4 (Winter 2004). Nathaniel Mackey. Bass Cathedral. New York: New Directions, 2008. — — — —. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. — — — —. Splay Anthem. New York: New Directions, 2006. Paul Naylor, ed. “Nathaniel Mackey: A Special Issue.” Callaloo 23.2 (Spring 2000). On Antiphon Island —“mu” twenty-eighth part— On Antiphon Island they lowered the bar and we went back. It wasn’t limbo we were in albeit Ø Nathaniel Mackey 380 we limbo’d.1 Everywhere we went we limbo’d, legs bent, shoulder blades grazing the dirt, donned andoumboulouous2 birth-shirts, sweat salting the silence we broke . . . Limbo’d so low we fell and lay looking up at the clouds, backs embraced by the ground and the ground a fallen wall we were ambushed by . . . Later we’d sit, sipping fig liqueur, beckoning...