STRONG READERS READING
THE DIFFICULT LONG POEM
A metronome does not measure the pleasure of reading a long
poem. The pleasure exists, outside of
time, in a reader's total aesthetic experience of bringing something to the
poem and taking away much more than she or he arrived with. Only strong readers survive, and some of them opt to transform knowledge
gained into actions. Others hoard their intellectual wealth. In American time-and-capital-driven cultures
of reading, one might argue that becoming a strong reader is often a luxury
enjoyed mainly by the incarcerated, for they are condemned to live in
"abnormal" time. While they may open their readings to the sufferings
of history, they do so without the Kabbalistic gestures Harold Bloom ascribes
to strong readers in A Map of Misreading
(1975). They employ fierce independence
and common sense.
Mackey, Nathaniel. Blue
Fasa. New York: New Directions, 2015.
In Discrepant
Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993),
Mackey provided theoretical foundations for grasping why his poetic practice
diverges from the orthodox frames of referentiality described in Stephen
Henderson's groundbreaking Understanding
the New Black Poetry (1973).
Nevertheless, attentive readers of this book can detect that Mackey's
practice is not alien in the tension-marked dynamics of modern African American
poetry. The relatively uncanonized works
of Russell Atkins and the canonized ones of Melvin B. Tolson, for example, are
prototypes of what conservative academic critics might judge to be the transgressions
of Mackey's poetics. They provide
evidence that difference and difficulty are inherently normal in our poetic
tradition, normal to the extent printed poetry can replay music.
Aware that his work appeals
most to a small, specialized readership,
Mackey warns in Discrepant Engagement
against "the totalizing pretensions of canon formation"(3) and urges
us not to dismiss "reminders of the
axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend"
(19). Ultimately, however, we can
account for where and why he is included by paralleling the critical efforts of
Brian McHale, T. J. Anderson III, and
Aldon L. Nielsen with those of Carolyn Rodgers and Kalamu ya Salaam and using
Amiri Baraka's writings on black music to walk the thin line between the blues
and jazz that paradoxically includes what it excludes . Note well that
paralleling is not identical with comparing.
Do not take my word for it. Use independent common sense to parallel
Anderson, T. J. , III. Notes
to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry. Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 2004.
Baraka, Amiri. Black
Music. New York: William Morrow, 1968.
McHale, Brian. The
Obligation toward the Difficult Whole. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2004.
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black
Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
Rodgers, Carolyn M. "Black Poetry --Where It's
At." Negro Digest (September
1969): 7-16.
ya Salaam, Kalamu. The Sound(ing) of Black Poetry: A Study Guide
to the Theory and History of Black Poetry (unpublished 1995)
[[Much of Kalamu ya Salaam's writing on poetry and music can
be studied by accessing the poet Rudolph
Lewis's ChickenBones at http://www.nathanielturner.com/kystable.htm
and ya Salaam's "Breath of Life" at http://www.kalamu.com/bol . We are deeply indebted to Lewis and ya Salaam
for their unique efforts to document African American
literature and culture. It is unfortunate
that academic pretensions "silence" their contributions to literary and cultural
discourses.]]
Prefaces or introductions to poetry books are often
lightweight, but Nathaniel Mackey is generous and wise in making his preface
heavy. It is a tutorial for reading Blue Fasa that drops knowledge, that plies
the slipping string.
The syntax of his prose is itself instructive:
"Blue Fasa continues Nod House's continuation of Splay
Anthem and the work that came before it, braiding the two serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and
"Mu," It continues a long song
that's one and more than one, "The/one song the songs all wanted in/on,
all inwardness inside out. The/ one song
the songs, added or/ not, added up to, song any one song/ was," as
"Song of the Andoumboulou: 68" puts it (xi)
Mackey painstakingly explains that the vibration one might
hear in the music of Rahsaan Roland Kirk "brings multiple senses of string
into play." Mackey takes care to position the words lyric/lyre/liar, so that his desire to integrate poetry and
musicality is not lost upon his readers. Neither is his yoking of the West African
musical tradition of griot epic with Brazilian bossa nova. Following his pull, a reader can swim in quantum
(recall the string theory of
contemporary physics) and the waters of rag to reach the shore where the voices
of refugees from history speak in Blue
Fasa, where "the wandering 'we" of this if not every long song,
this if not every long poem, especially this if not every serial poem, this
extended lyric, dream and would usher in a new history" (xv). Strong
readers will say we see what you are pulling our coats about. Reading Blue Fasa demands that we take small
steps and savor the particles before we dare engage the whole.
Ultimately, we can read Mackey's Blue Fasa by willing ourselves to
think in jazz, by subordinating totalizing pretensions to what we will
into being.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
September 2, 2015
