I like to think of it as dream.
I'd like to think of Nathaniel and Marilyn
as being in my dreams, one of those little bit.
Thank you Cybele and the UA Poetry Center.
Thank you to all the board members and participants
of Chax Press and POG and thanks particularly to Cynthia Miller
for her enthusiasm for the work you are about to hear
and her support of these organizations
and these artists and indeed of the arts in Tucson
in a big way.
What a treat?
Nathaniel Mackey and Marilyn Crispell,
two artists at the forefront of their respective practices
at the top of their game, so to speak,
two terrifically intelligent, caring, creative,
and articulate people who I'm learning more every day
are also a lot of fun.
Nathaniel Mackey is accomplished in poetry, fiction,
and in the writing of critical prose about literature.
He is an esteemed professor for many years
at the University of California at Santa Cruz
and in the last couple of years at Duke University.
He has graced Tucson before on at least two occasions
for the Tucson Poetry Festival.
Mackey's books of poetry include Nod House, Splay Anthem,
Whatsaid Serif, Song of the Andoumboulou 18 to 20,
School of Udhra, Outlandish, Eroding Witness,
Septet for the End of Time, Four for Trane, and Four for Glenn;
many are over here.
He's the author of an ongoing prose fiction
work From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume
Still Emanate of which four volumes have been published,
which take the form of letters from the musician N
to the angel of dust.
His published critical books, including
Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross Culturality
and Experimental Writing, and Paracritical Hinge:
Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews.
And he was co-editor with Art Lange
of the anthology, Moment's Notice: Jazz
in Poetry and Prose.
Two days ago Lisa Cooper Anderson
presented a session on Nathaniel Mackey's work
that focused at least in part on a way in which resonance,
a kind of base sounding connects many elements,
but connects them not necessarily
through logical development, but through soundings, echoes,
tangents, metonymy.
In another term one finds rhizomes with meaning flowing,
emerging here and there through the work rather than tree
structures where everything clearly
relates to a single rooted and branching structure.
Yet sometimes I wonder about that.
That is just as the poet Louis Zukofsky's formula for poetry,
lower limit speech upper limit music,
connects speech to music as much as it separates the two,
so elements in Mackey's work connect.
After all, discrepant engagement is still an engagement.
A paracritical hinge still a hinge,
something that may open onto a new world
but which also connects that world to the one we
occupy by means of that hinge.
Mackey's work exists at that point
where all is moving apart which is also the point at which one
can see all things held and existing even
if in tenuous ways together.
William Carlos Williams famously wrote
it is difficult to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day for lack
of what is found there.
What is found there in Mackey's poems
is music, meaning, strength, fragility, dignity, courage,
vision, brilliance and more, also
a sense of the ongoing nature of our experience.
And indeed serial works like the Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu
appear in book after book possibly without end.
If you experience as I do the sense of being
alive while in the midst of a poem by Nathaniel Mackey,
you just may not want it to end.
Please help me welcome Nathaniel Mackey.