WEBVTT

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I like to think of it as dream.

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I'd like to think of
Nathaniel and Marilyn

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as being in my dreams,
one of those little bit.

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Thank you Cybele and
the UA Poetry Center.

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Thank you to all the board
members and participants

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of Chax Press and POG and thanks
particularly to Cynthia Miller

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for her enthusiasm for the
work you are about to hear

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and her support of
these organizations

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and these artists and
indeed of the arts in Tucson

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in a big way.

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What a treat?

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Nathaniel Mackey and
Marilyn Crispell,

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two artists at the forefront
of their respective practices

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at the top of their
game, so to speak,

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two terrifically intelligent,
caring, creative,

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and articulate people who
I'm learning more every day

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are also a lot of fun.

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Nathaniel Mackey is
accomplished in poetry, fiction,

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and in the writing of critical
prose about literature.

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He is an esteemed
professor for many years

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at the University of
California at Santa Cruz

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and in the last couple of
years at Duke University.

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He has graced Tucson before
on at least two occasions

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for the Tucson Poetry Festival.

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Mackey's books of poetry
include Nod House, Splay Anthem,

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Whatsaid Serif, Song of
the Andoumboulou 18 to 20,

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School of Udhra,
Outlandish, Eroding Witness,

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Septet for the End of Time, Four
for Trane, and Four for Glenn;

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many are over here.

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He's the author of an
ongoing prose fiction

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work From a Broken
Bottle Traces of Perfume

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Still Emanate of which four
volumes have been published,

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which take the form of
letters from the musician N

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to the angel of dust.

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His published critical
books, including

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Discrepant Engagement:
Dissonance, Cross Culturality

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and Experimental Writing,
and Paracritical Hinge:

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Essays, Talks,
Notes, Interviews.

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And he was co-editor
with Art Lange

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of the anthology,
Moment's Notice: Jazz

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in Poetry and Prose.

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Two days ago Lisa
Cooper Anderson

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presented a session on
Nathaniel Mackey's work

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that focused at least in part
on a way in which resonance,

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a kind of base sounding
connects many elements,

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but connects them
not necessarily

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through logical development,
but through soundings, echoes,

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tangents, metonymy.

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In another term one finds
rhizomes with meaning flowing,

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emerging here and there through
the work rather than tree

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structures where
everything clearly

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relates to a single rooted
and branching structure.

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Yet sometimes I
wonder about that.

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That is just as the poet Louis
Zukofsky's formula for poetry,

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lower limit speech
upper limit music,

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connects speech to music as
much as it separates the two,

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so elements in
Mackey's work connect.

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After all, discrepant engagement
is still an engagement.

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A paracritical
hinge still a hinge,

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something that may
open onto a new world

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but which also connects
that world to the one we

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occupy by means of that hinge.

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Mackey's work
exists at that point

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where all is moving apart which
is also the point at which one

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can see all things
held and existing even

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if in tenuous ways together.

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William Carlos
Williams famously wrote

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it is difficult to get
the news from poems,

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yet men die miserably
every day for lack

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of what is found there.

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What is found there
in Mackey's poems

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is music, meaning, strength,
fragility, dignity, courage,

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vision, brilliance
and more, also

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a sense of the ongoing
nature of our experience.

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And indeed serial works like the
Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu

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appear in book after book
possibly without end.

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If you experience as I
do the sense of being

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alive while in the midst of
a poem by Nathaniel Mackey,

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you just may not want it to end.

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Please help me welcome
Nathaniel Mackey.

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