Nathaniel Mackey works in the areas of modern and postmodern literature in the U.S. and the Caribbean, creative writing, poetry and poetics, and the intersection of literature and music. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction and criticism, most recently Nod House (2011), Bass Cathedral (2008), and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (2005). Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company. He is editor of the literary magazine Hambone and coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (1993). He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Professor of English.
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Bedouin HornbookFrom a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1
The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…
Bedouin Hornbook:From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1 -
Bedouin HornbookFrom a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1
…two nights ago I received a phone call from someone who refused to identify himself. He said that if I wanted to meet with the Crossroads Choir I should go alone, on foot and carrying the horn of my choice to the summit where Stocker, Overhill and La Brea come together. This I should do, he said, at half past midnight and once I got there blindfold myself and wait. I would be picked up and from there taken to where I’d, as he put it, “be allowed the audience you so deeply desire.” I tried asking what the point of all the cloak and dagger business was, but he cut me off my emphatically repeating, “Alone, on foot and with the horn of your choice!” And with that he abruptly hung up.
Bedouin Hornbook:From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1 -
Bedouin HornbookFrom a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1
Lambert went on at some length but what he had to say basically came down to this: He was no longer convinced that the band’s “come-as-you-are” approach to percussion was the most effective. He granted that our practice of making everyone in the band responsible for percussive contributions on a variety of “little instruments” (bongos, shakers, tambourines and what have you) has a certain communal, democratic beauty to it. Still, he argued, he increasingly felt a need for a more assured, authoritative rhythmic presence, “a percussive anchor.”
Bedouin Hornbook:From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1
“Mackey’s major prose project is an experiment in serial fiction called From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. It feels, sentence to sentence and page to page, like a work in the act of being created. It is not simply writing about jazz, but writing as jazz . . . There is a cliché about music writing, sometimes attributed to Thelonious Monk, among others: ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ If so, Nathaniel Mackey is compelled, rather than deterred, by the multiform madness of the enterprise. He is the Balanchine of the architecture dance.” —David Hajdu, The New York Times
“An open-ended exegesis of musical meaning that is equal parts African American history, Bedouin mysticism, and Mackey's own imagination.” —The Believer [on Bass Cathedral]
“In oblique, elliptical fashion, these poems follow the dispersal of African peoples by half a millennium of catastrophes, from slavery to Hurricane Katrina . . . The pleasure of the book comes from its descriptive daring—Billie Holiday’s voice sounds ‘evacuated’; the evolution of media is envisioned as an ouroboros (‘The book bit his tail and became a / disc’)—and from Mackey’s refusal to decipher his narrative: ‘Non-allegorical ground it / was we stood on.’” —The New Yorker [on Nod House]
Selected Works
