NATHANIEL MACKEY. Splay Anthem. New Directions. 2006
reviewed by CRYSTAL CURRY
I’m not convinced
that any review can do Splay Anthem,
Nathaniel Mackey’s newest book, justice, as Mackey, himself, writes an
extraordinarily entertaining eight-page preface that elucidates (and
complicates) his own thought processes behind the serial poems “Song of the Andoumboulou” and the “mu” series far better and richer
than any reviewer might.
Mackey’s ornate prose,
always a treat, takes for granted that the reader already knows that he or she
is on a journey like no other, making references to previous installments and
concepts that have arisen along the 20-year span of the project. The result is
an engaging expository note for those who are not familiar with either Mackey’s
previous work or the West African cosmology from which the inspiration for the
work comes, and a head-nodding affirmation of Mackey’s continued labors for
those who have already set foot down Mackey’s path.
Mackey writes that
both the “Song of the Andoumboulou” and the “mu” series, which
are both included in Splay Anthem,
are inseparable, each “the other’s understudy”:
“Each is the other, each is both, announcedly
so in this book by way of number, in earlier books, not so announcedly
so. By turns visibly and invisibly present, each is the other’s twin or
contagion, each entwines the other’s crabbed advance.”
Mackey goes on to
explain that the Andoumboulou of Dogon
cosmology are a “failed, or flawed, earlier form of human,” that he cannot help
thinking of as more of a “rough draft,” or “work-in-progress.” The “mu” series, on which
Mackey writes “carries a theme of utopic reverie,”
takes its title from a Don Cherry album, as well as the term “muthos” and is
inspired by a lost “Atlantis-like continent.”
Splay Anthem, as well as the previous volumes which
included installments of the poems, Eroding
Witness, School of Udhra and Whatsaid Serif, is
at once an epic journey, and at once a drunken, zig-zagged
jaunt, distance being irrelevant and place being ever un-fixed, ever collapsing
in on itself. There is little in the way of a crystallized path, as each moment
is a part of another moment – joined by recurring scenes, variations on
Mackey’s “anagrammatic scat,” and the jazz-inspired music that enables the wild
disjunctions to move fluidly over the landscape of the page.
The book starts off
with four poems from the “mu” series, “Andoumboulouous
Brush,” “Beginning With Lines By Anwar
Naguib,” “Spectral Escort,” and “Lag Anthem.” The
poems start off quietly, guiding us back into Mackey’s cosmic dream world with
a whisper and the beginning strains of music, at once an easy headlong saunter
into the journey of Mackey’s “band of nervous travelers,” as well as a
pronouncement that the author’s obsession is guided by something larger than
itself:
Blew
across its
opening. Blew as
if
cooling soup… Someone
behind him blowing
bigger
than him
giggled,
muse whose
jutting
lips he kissed as he
could… “Mouth that
moved my mouth,”
he
soughed,
hummed it,
made it buzz…
(“Andoumboulouous Brush”)
Mackey writes in
“Lag Anthem,” “Paper-thin wall we called / a world and on the other / side
what,” a sentiment that continually re-occurs – a “see-thru” world “sealed on
all sides,” (Song of the Andoumboulou: 44) the
possibility that the world “was only a dream I / dreamt at a stoplight in
It is the
interaction between the perceptible, physical world – the world of sex and bourbon,
loquat trees and trumpets, and historical
authority – and the eidolic dreamscape that
enables Mackey, amongst the jazz references, stylized language, dizzying
locales and spaced-out cosmology, to press some of the most heart-wrenching
moments of exigency (hearkening to the romantic/lyric tradition) that manage to
not only recall problems of the modern age, but also the colonial slave trade,
as well as seamlessly include a four-poem memorial (first published as the
chapbook Four For Glenn) to late Bay
Area tenor saxophonist Glenn Spearman:
A bitter
book in our stomachs,
an aftertaste
on
our tongues, a
book
based
on another
Glenn,
Monk’s
Mountain not the Monk’s we
took it for. A
book of overlay,
a book about death at
fifty-one,
a book
we lay awake at
night reading,
a book we read wanting
to wake up
from…
(“Glenn on Monk’s
Mountain”)
One poem that
recalls the affect of the most dark and climactic passage in Whatsaid Serif is “On Antiphon Island,” a poem
selected by Robert Creeley for the Best American
Poetry 2001. In Whatsaid Serif’s “Song of the Andoumboulou: 20,” Mackey’s passengers are on what appears
to be a cosmic slave ship, or train, on the way to be “sold / on blocks,
auctioned / off.” The poem breaks off into several short ethereal passages, one
ending “Noses / wide with the smell of / earth after rain, / held each other, /
lifted, / let go.”
From “On
Where we
were was the hold
of a ship we were
caught
in. Soaked wood
kept us afloat… It
wasn’t
limbo we were in albeit we
limbo’d
our way there. Where we
were was what we
meant by “mu.”
Where
we were was
real, remniscent
arrest we resisted
bodies briefly
had
held on
to
And in the fashion
of “utopic reverie,” the passengers imagine the world
as “ever after, elsewhere, / no / way where we were / was there.”
Throughout the book Mackey reminds us that an inseverable marriage between form and content is the most
striking element of his work. It as if this epic can not be told in any other way than the highly stylized, jazz-motivated,
variation-heavy sprint that is the hallmark of Mackey’s poetic craft.
Essentialist claims aside, it is the music and the word play that enable the
disjunctions to move flawlessly and enable us to visit and re-visit Lone Coast,
The Long-Night Lounge, the boat, the train, the ambulance, etc., with eager
anticipation, each time. The surface of the poems also allows for the
playfulness that perfectly counter-balances Mackey’s dense subject matter:
Asked his name, he said,
“Stra, short for Stranger.”
Sang it. Semi-said, semisung.
“Stronjer?”
I asked, semisang,
half in jest.
“Stronger,”
he
whatsaid
back.
(“Song of the Andoumboulou:
40”)
As the travelers
progress across Mackey’s landscape, which takes us from Spain to Egypt to
Pelvic Hollow to “Fallen-Tree-Where-The-President-Spat,” events climax or,
excuse me, shit gets motherfucking
crazy – an ambulance crash that has the participants crawling “crablike”
“every which way” (“Song of the Andoumboulou: 51”),
the arrival at Dread Lakes, where the elders, come back as children, drink wine
and talk “bubbletalk” (“Dread Lakes Aperture”), while
the whole world dissolves in color and jazz noise and light.
The book “ends”
with a section called “Nub,” where it seems the travelers are coming to a point
where they are about to – ready or not – accept their fate as the rough draft,
this section reminding us that Mackey is not only speaking of the
celestial/spectral travelers, but us, as well: “Caught in costal weather, came
/ in from the rain, they the two, / we who will have been none.”
Mackey writes of Nub:
“Thus the
chronically resided in, repeatedly arrived at Nub (nubbed
version Nuh), place name and diagnosis fraught with
senses of diminishment: failed extension or falling short but not only that,
the proverbial nub drawn back from overreaching but not only that, phantom
limb’s compensated occasion but not only that, remnant wish, but not only that.
Nub begins to collapse into the universe’s expanse,
into the earth, into air, into the jukebox – and, more delicately, into the
author. As Mackey gives us a glimpse into his obsession at
the beginning of the book, so comes a passage, near the end, where we perhaps
get a glimpse into the author’s own feelings. As it is “getting to be
the end again,” Mackey writes the following passage:
Stark light the day I saw thru. I
too
spoke with a shell on my
voice, tongue a
thick worm in
my throat. I was
at the beginning
again,
wanting to
undo and redo what was
done.
I was only what was left…
Nub was being what was left, I
was Nub. Nub was
being remnant,
regret. I was
debris, I was what
was
left.
(“Sound
and Cerement”)
Just as the passengers within Mackey’s epic poem
are unsure when they’ll step off the vehicle (sometimes reassured by a “not
yet,” from a wily conductor) – and are often unsure if there’s even a place to
disembark, we, as readers of Mackey’s work, are on a similar journey, both on
the page and off. Mackey takes us through a ghost history -- our history -- to
the rings of Saturn to a children’s pizza parlor, to L.A., to a psychedelic
crab walk, all the while pointing at us, pointing at himself, giving us a jazz
lesson, and making us wonder about what might be happening in another dimension
and what songs the dead might be singing. The jacket copy calls the poem(s) an
“intersection of everything,” and while it is an ambitious claim, it is not
necessarily untrue.