Rhythmic poetry: master poet Nathaniel Mackey's language of rebellion.

It was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master and it was in [the slave's] (mis-)use of [language] that [they] perhaps most effectively, rebelled.

--Kamau Brathwaite

POET NATHANIEL MACKEY WAS BORN IN 1947 IN MIAMI, Florida. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Eroding Witness (University of Illinois Press, 1986), School of Udhra (City Lights Publishers, 1993), Whatsaid Serif (City Lights Publishers, 2001) and Four for Glenn (Chax Press, 2002), as well as the critical works Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interview (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

In 2006, New Directions published his latest volume of poetry, Splay Anthem, which won the National Book Award. Mackey lives in Santa Cruz, where he is a professor at the University of California, and longtime host of the radio program Tanganyika Strut on KUSP, 88.9FM. It is difficult, if not impossible, to place Mackey within any particular "school" of poetry, although upon hearing the rhythm rifts in his work, one thinks of Amiri Baraka, without provocative political edge. Mackey's edge is a cutting into the word itself a kind of disharmony in rifts akin to avant-garde jazz musicians Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor or Don Cherry.

Nathaniel Mackey (called Nate by almost everyone) may indeed be the only contemporary American poet whose work often travels via MP3 file. When several years ago, I, for example, told a friend about my interest in Mackey's work, he made a CD copy of Strick, a sound recording of Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, and put it in nay mailbox. For weeks, I listened to the recording in my car, enraptured first by "Track Two;' which begins with an instrument indecipherable to me from a voice, a haunting chant, a rising from a terse depth. Then Mackey's own "post-bebop" voice enters, enhanced by and integral to the music that the ear hears as a part of the poetry itself. No clashing of genres here. As Richard Quinn writes: "Strick is a text-recording of boundless hybridity, a cross-fertilization of jazz and poetry," which forces us to "rethink much of what we know about music, language, sound and poetry." This is true, in part, because Mackey's work is a bringing together of all of these elements. His poetry occupies the line between avant-garde jazz, sound poetry and innovative language creations.

Imagine the sounds of sounds before birth. In a way, that's what it is like to enter the world of Mackey's poetry. It is a world of music and myth, a world before words and after worlds, the ancient and the holy, music like voices, and voices that call that music from some unimaginable place. Mackey's poems draw on his earliest experiences of the otherworldly--those in the Baptist Church, the congregation entranced and "speaking in tongues" in response to gospel music. As Mackey himself says, "Seeing people respond to music in ways that were quite different from music being listened to in a concert situation, I mean people actually going into states of trance or possession in church, had a tremendous and continuing impact on me."

As many writers have noted, the impact of music on Mackey's poetry cannot be overstated nor can the impact of music's capacity to metamorphosize us, to lure us into some other state of being. Like the innovative jazz that inspires Mackey, his poetry can at first be difficult to really hear. We find ourselves unfamiliar with its references, its ways of speech. It is foreign to our ears. When we do hear it, however, when we let it do its work on our bodies and all that is beyond the body, we find, as Mackey writes in Strick, an "ecstatic elsewhere."

It is partially this complexity in Mackey's poetry--this genre-crossing, this improvisation with sound and noise--that often puts his work in the category of "the difficult." In turn, this "difficulty" and Mackey's self-professed engagement with the experimental is why it hit him--and many of his readers--as a pleasant surprise when he won the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry for Splay Anthem, since the award is rarely, if ever, given to poets who are classified as avant-garde. In a Publishers Weekly interview, Mackey makes reference to this fact, when he says, " ... this is not only a good thing for me and my work but an important thing for poetry more generally, especially poetry coming from the place in the aesthetic spectrum that my work comes from: the experimental, avant-garde, vanguard or difficult."

But what, audiences might ask, does Mackey's work say? His saying, undoubtedly, is not a shout. There are "certain communities," Mackey writes in his essay "On Edge," who prioritize their voices in the form of a "shout," which inevitably results in a silencing of other speech. Shouting by those "certain communities" carries with it the historical weight of dominant and oppressive belief systems that effectively make other speech difficult or, sometimes, impossible.

Kamau Brathwaite uses slavery as an example when he contends that "slaves" were imprisoned in so-called "official" language, and successfully rebelled by misusing that language. Given the conditions--poverty, incarceration, colonialization and economic globalization--that bespeak contemporary efforts to silence the speech of racialized people, Mackey offers alternatives to speech as a comfortable means of communication. And this is where his resistance lies.

Mackey's relationship to language, like the innovators before him, can be read as a gesture of critique and rebellion. It manifests itself in that place where the throat meets extreme emotion--pain, grief or spiritual euphoria. His struggle, then, is the oxymoronic saying of the unsayable, but the unsayable here seeks speech by ways of the stutter, the guttural, the moan, the cracking of the throat, a cold sweat, a hoarse drunkenness.

How does one speak, for example, the horror of slavery, or, in contemporary terms, the horror of the genocide in Darfur, the terrorists attacks on 9/11, or the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib?

Using the broken-voiced song of the Andalusian singer in Federico Garcia Lords tale of the duende or a troublemaking spirit, Mackey seeks a speaking that emerges from these sites of unspeakability. He attempts to excite cante jondo, or deep song, and to move to the expression of duende.

In what is arguably his most important essay, "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," Mackey uses the example of the gisalo, the quintessential song of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, to exemplify the possibilities of music that don't ordinarily exist for poetry. The songs "arise from a breach in human solidarity, a violation of kinship, community, connection." Gisalo provokes and crosses over into weeping--weeping that has to do with some such breach, usually death. "[They] are sung at funerals and during spirit-medium seances and have the melodic cry of a kind of fruit dove, the muni bird." That moment of the cry, the guttural, is often what Mackey seeks in his poems. As in a long, weaving improvisational movement in Taylor's jazz, or the strangely euphoric sadness and trancelike states in Baptist churches, or, certainly the arrival of duende in the trouble voice of the flamenco singer, the location of Mackey's guttural is difficult to excerpt from the larger piece. In fact, those inarticulate moments are made possible by all the other stuff that surrounds them.

Dawn Lundy Martin is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she is writing her dissertation on experimentalism and subjectivity in contemporary poetry.