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8 books match the query 'Mackey, Nathaniel'

cover of Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art

Conceptualisms

The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art

Edited by Steve Tomasula

University of Alabama Press, 2022

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators

A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.

Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future.

Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live.

The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.
 

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cover of Double Quartet, Volume I

Double Quartet, Volume I

Nathaniel Mackey

Duke University Press, 2027

Double Quartet, Volume I continues Nathaniel Mackey’s two intertwined serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu,” which he has been composing since the 1970s. Drawing on diverse traditions of poetry, literature, and jazz, Mackey pursues a musical approach to verging on and dispensing with the epic form. The poems follows a band of nervous, weary, and bewildered travelers as they touch on the predicaments and apprehensions of exile and uprootedness. Mackey’s writing moves by way of angle, ellipse, and accretion. He employs the arts, lore, figurative traditions, and historical motifs of the African diaspora and beyond to further a cross-cultural weave of global reach. Together, the poems of Double Quartet enact an improvisational jazz aesthetic that valorizes the tangled relationships of part to whole and whole to part. Double Quartet once again demonstrates Mackey’s innovative and distinctive mastery of rendering the ineluctable entwinement of the poetic and the musical, the written and the spoken.
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cover of Double Quartet, Volume II

Double Quartet, Volume II

Nathaniel Mackey

Duke University Press, 2027

Double Quartet, Volume II continues Nathaniel Mackey’s two intertwined serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu,” which he has been composing since the 1970s. Drawing on diverse traditions of poetry, literature, and jazz, Mackey pursues a musical approach to verging on and dispensing with the epic form. The poems follows a band of nervous, weary, and bewildered travelers as they touch on the predicaments and apprehensions of exile and uprootedness. Mackey’s writing moves by way of angle, ellipse, and accretion. He employs the arts, lore, figurative traditions, and historical motifs of the African diaspora and beyond to further a cross-cultural weave of global reach. Together, the poems of Double Quartet enact an improvisational jazz aesthetic that valorizes the tangled relationships of part to whole and whole to part. Double Quartet once again demonstrates Mackey’s innovative and distinctive mastery of rendering the ineluctable entwinement of the poetic and the musical, the written and the spoken.
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cover of Nathaniel Mackey, Destination Out: Essays on His Work

Nathaniel Mackey, Destination Out

Essays on His Work

Jeanne Heuving

University of Iowa Press, 2021

In this first book of essays devoted entirely to Nathaniel Mackey’s work, prominent critics respond to a major oeuvre that is at once affirmative and utopic, negational and dystopic. Drawing on multiple genealogies and traditions, primarily from African and African diaspora histories and cultures, Mackey’s work envisions cultural creation as cross-cultural, based in the damaging relationships of Africans brought against their will to the Americas and the resulting innovations of New World African literatures and music.

This collection is organized through broad topics in order to provide entrances into his challenging work: myth, literature, and seriality; music, performance, and collaboration; syncretism, synopsis, and what-saying. It engages Mackey’s spiritual and esoteric disposition along with his attention to what Amiri Baraka called the “enraged sociologies” of Black music. In his manifesto “Destination Out,” Mackey describes his work as “wanting to bid all givens goodbye” and as “centrifugal.” It is also centripetal, manifesting a reflexive interiority that creates itself through recurring forms.
 
Contributors: Maria Damon, Joseph Donahue, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein, Luke Harley, Paul Jaussen, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Peter O’Leary, Anthony Reed
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cover of Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry

Notes to Make the Sound Come Right

Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry

T.J. Anderson III

University of Arkansas Press, 2004

In “When Malindy Sings” the great African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar writes about the power of African American music, the “notes to make the sound come right.” In this book T. J. Anderson III, son of the brilliant composer, Thomas Anderson Jr., asserts that jazz became in the twentieth century not only a way of revising old musical forms, such as the spiritual and work song, but also a way of examining the African American social and cultural experience. He traces the growing history of jazz poetry and examines the work of four innovative and critically acclaimed African American poets whose work is informed by a jazz aesthetic: Stephen Jonas (1925?–1970) and the unjustly overlooked Bob Kaufman (1925–1986), who have affinities with Beat poetry; Jayne Cortez (1936– ), whose work is rooted in surrealism; and the difficult and demanding Nathaniel Mackey (1947– ), who has links to the language writers. Each fashioned a significant and vibrant body of work that employs several of the key elements of jazz. Anderson shows that through their use of complex musical and narrative weaves these poets incorporate both the tonal and performative structures of jazz and create work that articulates the African journey. From improvisation to polyrhythm, they crafted a unique poetics that expresses a profound debt to African American culture, one that highlights the crucial connection between music and literary production and links them to such contemporary writers as Michael Harper, Amiri Baraka, and Yusef Komunyakaa, as well as young recording artists—United Future Organization, Us3, and Groove Collection—who have successfully merged hip-hop poetry and jazz.
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cover of Paracritical Hinge: Essay, Talks, Notes, Interviews

Paracritical Hinge

Essay, Talks, Notes, Interviews

Nathaniel Mackey

University of Iowa Press, 2018

Paracritical Hinge is a collection of varied yet interrelated pieces highlighting Nathaniel Mackey’s multifaceted work as writer and critic. It embraces topics ranging from Walt Whitman’s interest in phrenology to the marginalization of African American experimental writing; from Kamau Brathwaite’s “calibanistic” language practices to Federico García Lorca’s flamenco aesthetic of duende and its continuing repercussions; from H. D.’s desert measure and coastal way of knowing to the altered spatial disposition of Miles Davis’s trumpet sound; from Robert Duncan’s serial poetics to diasporic syncretism; from the lyric poem’s present-day predicaments to gnosticism. Offering illuminating commentary on these and other artists including Amiri Baraka, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Wilson Harris, Jack Spicer, John Coltrane, Jay Wright, and Bob Kaufman, Paracritical Hinge also sheds light on Mackey’s own work as a poet, fiction writer, and editor.

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cover of Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History

Poetic Investigations

Singing the Holes in History

Paul Naylor

Northwestern University Press, 1999

Poetic Investigations studies five contemporary writers whose radical engagements with poetic form and political content shed new light on issues of race, class, and gender. In a detailed reading of three American poets—Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Lyn Hejinian—and two African-Caribbean poets, Kamau Brathwaite and M. Nourbese Philip, Paul Naylor argues that these writers have produced new forms of poetry that address the "holes," or erasures, in history that more traditional poetry neglects.
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cover of What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America

What I Say

Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America

Aldon Lynn Nielsen

University of Alabama Press, 2015

What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection that brings this pivotal work up to the present day.
 
The elder poets in this collection, such as Nathaniel Mackey, C. S. Giscombe, Will Alexander, and Ron Allen, came of age during and were powerfully influenced by the Black Arts Movement, and What I Say grounds the collection in its black modernist roots. In tracing the fascinating and unexpected paths of experimentation these poets explored, however, Nielsen and Ramey reveal the tight delineations of African American poetry that omitted noncanonical forms. This invigorating panoply of work, when restored, brings into focus the creatively elastic frontiers and multifaceted expressions of contemporary black poetry.
 
Several of the poets discussed in What I Say forged relationships with members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement and participated in the broader community of innovative poetry that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and continues to exert a powerful influence today.
 
Each volume can stand on its own, and reading them in tandem will provide a clear vision of how innovative African American poetries have evolved across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. What I Say is infinitely teachable, compelling, and rewarding. It will appeal to a broad readership of poets, poetics teachers, poetics scholars, students of African American literature in nonnarrative forms, Afro-futurism, and what lies between the modern and the contemporary in global and localized writing practices.
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