School of Udhra takes its title from the Bedouin poetic tradition associated with the seventh-century Arab poet Djamil, the Udhrite school of poets who, -when loving die.- Bedouin tradition, however, is only one of the strands of world revery these poems have recourse to. They obey a -bedouin- impulse of their own--fugitive, moving on, nomadic. Ogo the fox, the Dogon avatar of singleness and unrest, runs throughout, crossing and recrossing divided ground, primal isolate, insistent within the book's cross-cultural weave.
The poems track variances of union and disunion- social,...
School of Udhra takes its title from the Bedouin poetic tradition associated with the seventh-century Arab poet Djamil, the Udhrite school o...
The editors have collected the jazz-inspired works of close to sixty writers ranging from Julio Cortazar and Jessica Hagedorn to Langston Hughes and Ishmael Reed. -Moment's Notice is the best anthology of jazz literature I've ever seen.---Bart Schneider, Hungry Mind Review -The jazz anthology to end all jazz anthologies.---Booklist
The editors have collected the jazz-inspired works of close to sixty writers ranging from Julio Cortazar and Jessica Hagedorn to Langston Hughes and I...
Discrepant Engagement addresses work by a number of authors not normally grouped under a common rubric--black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets. Nathaniel Mackey examines the ways in which the experimental aspects of their work advance a critique of the assumptions underlying conventional perceptions and practice. Arguing that the work of these writers engages the discrepancy between presumed norms and qualities of experience such norms fail to accommodate, Mackey highlights their valorization of dissonance, divergence and formal...
Discrepant Engagement addresses work by a number of authors not normally grouped under a common rubric--black writers from the United States and the C...
With Nathaniel Mackey s fifth collection of poems, Nod House, we witness a confluence of music and meaning unprecedented in American poetry. Mackey s art continues to push the envelope of what is possible to map and remap through words in sounds and sounds in words. Picking up with Nub s disintegration at the end of his previous collection the National Book Award winning Splay Anthem we follow a traveler and a tribe of travelers ensconced in myth and history as Mackey continues to weave his precisely measured music with two ongoing serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu. The collec-...
With Nathaniel Mackey s fifth collection of poems, Nod House, we witness a confluence of music and meaning unprecedented in American poetry. Mackey s ...
Nathaniel Mackey s sixth collection of poems, Blue Fasa, carries forward what the New Yorker has described as the mythological conception and descriptive daring of his two intertwined serial poems. A long song that's one and more than one, this collection takes its title from two related black musical traditions, a West African griot epic as told by the Fasa, a clan in ancient Ghana, and trumpeter Kenny Dorham s hard bop classic Blue Bossa, influenced by the emergence of Brazilian bossa nova. The book opens with the catch of the heart and the call of romance, as it follows a band of...
Nathaniel Mackey s sixth collection of poems, Blue Fasa, carries forward what the New Yorker has described as the mythological conception and descript...
Nathaniel Mackey's Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.'s jazz sextet, Molimo m'Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothespinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal.
Over the next nine months, N.'s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of...
Nathaniel Mackey's Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic ...
