Biography
Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida and moved to California at age three when his parents split. As a teen, he started listening to jazz at his brother's suggestion, which later influenced his work. He visited Princeton University as a high school student along with Gene Washington where he was able to see live jazz in Manhattan. The trip was instrumental in the decision to attend the university. After he graduated with a BA, he returned to Southern California to teach algebra at a junior high school. [4]
In 1970, Mackey enrolled in Stanford University for his doctorate. His dissertation was about the Black Mountain poets and the poetry they created with the human rhythms of breath and utterance. After graduation, he taught at University of Wisconsin and the University of Southern California before moving on to the literature department at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1979. He held that position until 2010 when he moved with his family to North Carolina to take a position at Duke University. [4]
Poetry
Mackey's books of poetry include the chapbooks Four for Trane (1978) and Septet for the End of Time (1983); and the books Eroding Witness (1985), School of Udhra (1993), Whatsaid Serif (1998), Splay Anthem (2006), Nod House (2011), and Blue Fasa (2016), as well as the books Tej Bet, So's Notice, and Nerve Church, which were published together as a boxed set called Double Trio in 2021. In 2016, Black Ocean Books published a collection called Lay Ghost that featured songs that later appeared in So's Notice.
- "...Mackey's series of improvisatory jazz-inspired fictions locates a ground between invention and listening that he defines as the source of culture itself. All culture, for Mackey, is a form of listening to what "we" are collectively improvising."
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| Barrett Watten [5] |
Mackey's poetry combines African mythology, African-American musical traditions, and Modernist poetic experiment. His ongoing serial projects, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu", explore the relationship of poetry and historical memory, as well the dissonance between his American context and those of Africa and the Middle-East. [6]
Criticism and editing
In 1974, Mackey became an editor of the poetry journal Hambone , later becoming the sole editor and publisher in 1982. [4]
Mackey is the author of Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993), [7] an influential book of literary theory, and more recently of Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (2004). [8] He co-edited Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose with Art Lange (1993). [9]
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Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
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Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
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