43:1 Winter 1997

NATHANIEL MACKEY

from Atet A.D.

Nathaniel Mackey is a poet, critic, editor, and Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His poetry and prose are marked by a sharp sense of sound, and he takes his permissions from a surprising range of influences: Robert Duncan and free jazz are happily held together in the same breath in his work. His most recent books are Splay Anthem (New Directions) and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Wisconsin).

The Winter 1997 issue featured an interview with Mackey by Peter O’Leary and an excerpt from Atet A.D., the third volume of Mackey’s ongoing series of epistolary novels, collectively titled From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. The introduction to O’Leary’s interview describes the letters as “sometimes hallucinatory accounts of improvisations, sometimes hypnogogically clear descriptions of actual performances, and sometimes virtual lectures on musical ideas.”

In a 1991 interview, Mackey explained the genesis of the project:

The letters got started from an actual correspondence. A friend of mine to whom I'd sent a couple of poems or something wrote back with some questions. By way of talking about or addressing those questions I wrote it out in the form of a letter which began "Dear Angel of Dust" and made a copy and sent it to this friend. So it began in actual correspondence but it was like proposing another correspondence that I was allowing this friend to eavesdrop on, so to speak, though the thoughts were provoked by his questions. At that point I was getting interested in prose as something which could include, in a more explicit way, certain types and areas of information that I was interested in but that I couldn't work into poetry, at least not in such an explicit way as I could in prose.

In a more recent interview, Mackey had the following to say about the relationship between the fiction and the poetry:

Early on I thought of the Angel of Dust letters as a bit like liner notes for the poems, unpacking or being more expository about matters which inform the poems but that poems, given poetry’s musical demand and condensation, tend to be elliprical about. Romance, collectivity, sexuality, and spirituality are some of the concerns that the prose and poetry share. It’s worth noting that certain differences in tone are as much a part of the conversation as the similarities and overlaps I’ve mentioned are --- the prose’s comic strain, for example, being something the poems don’t get into that much. Anyway in the early 80s I began to include the letters in poetry readings, reading from them as well as reading poems. That’s one of the things that got me involved with and more intimate with the fact that prose has its music. Over the years the prose came to exert a more stylistic influence on the poems, leading me to stretch out and to vary the kinds of locution poems allow. [New American Writing 24 (2006), p. 40]

Mackey hosts Tanganyika Strut, a radio program on KUSP; a recent reading of his at the University of Chicago has been archived here. Atet A.D. was published by City Lights in 2001.

[ES, 2006]

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