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2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
“HOW / TO MAKE MOMENT MORE THAN / MOMENT” a review by Robert M. West Nathaniel Mackey. Blue Fasa. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2015.
Read about ROBERT M. WEST with a review of his two-volume collection of The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons in this issue. NATHANIEL MACKEY is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University. He has a PhD in English from Stanford University and an AB in African American Studies from Princeton University. His books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism include Nod House (New Directions, 2011), Bass Cathedral (New Directions, 2007), Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), and a CD of his poetry with musical accompaniment called Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16–25 (Spoken Engine Co, 1995). He coedited the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and is the current editor of Hambone, a literary magazine.
Contemporary American poetry is a diverse, sprawling scene – so much so that even those specializing in the field have only a partial knowledge of it. One may know a great deal about work published by New York houses and other Northeastern presses, but little about poetry brought out by university and small presses in other regions. Another may have an encyclopedic knowledge of confessional and other autobiographical verse, while knowing nothing of eco-poetry. Yet another may know language poetry or other avant-garde movements inside out, while knowing next to nothing about neoformalism. Inevitably, anthologies of contemporary US poetry advertise their editors’ limitations. While something similar may be true of other recent American writing as well, poetry’s relatively peripheral status – even among the literati – exacerbates the problem. Few of the remaining bookstores have substantial poetry sections if they sell poetry at all. Our large-circulation newspapers and magazines, even those that regularly publish book reviews, seldom review poetry volumes. There seems to be a trend among college and university English departments of minimizing or even eliminating poetry as a required aspect of the curriculum. As a result, when it comes to discovering current American poetry, and especially its breadth and diversity, most readers are very much on their own. All of which is to say that it’s possible for someone interested in the field not to have encountered
the poetry of Nathaniel Mackey – despite the fact that he has won some of the most prestigious honors an American poet can receive, including the 2006 National Book Award, Yale University’s 2015 Bollingen Prize, and the 2014 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, in addition to an appointment in 2010 as the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University. For such a reader, Blue Fasa may not be the single best point of entry into his oeuvre, but it would serve well enough; it quickly establishes Mackey’s gifts for acrobatic play between syntax and versification and offers a great deal of intriguing meditation and narrative. First, though, the reader will face the author’s preface. It may seem, to borrow a phrase from John Ashbery, “the shield of a greeting,” a welcome that to some may sound like a warning.1 Mackey points out that the book extends not one but two long poems – one titled Song of the Andoumboulou and the other titled Mu – parts of which appear in his preceding book, Nod House (2011), and the book before that, his National Book Award-winning book, Splay Anthem (2006), which in turn picks up from earlier work. Mackey then contextualizes and explains the two poems as they’ve developed to this point, and as Blue Fasa further develops them. Some readers might be daunted by the range of reference: in explaining his aims, Mackey invokes seventeen other poets, musicians, and scholars – from Jalal al-Din Rumi to Louis Zukofsky to Amiri Baraka, from 1
John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in A Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975).