Whatsaid Serif

let's say that 10,000 years ago, mackey traced with a twig the letters of eliot's wasteland and gazed thru a gloss onto lafogue's landscape, a luxury in the most tenuous of senses, as was wideman's from home hurried trip to spain just a little less tenuous, give or take a millennium. in whatsaid serif, mackey writes: ...it was a train /in southern spain we/were on... ...it was a train we were on,/peripatetic tavern we/were in... ...expression/was on the jukebox... ...someone punched `people get ready'/on the jukebox... the song mackey mentions begins `people get ready, there's a train a'comin' recorded by the impressions with curtis mayfield in 1964. riddle and word play, allusion and anagram run thru this song cloth. mackey knows sufi translates as cloth, sophia as wisdom. mackey has woven, is weaving, a poem of the world, of world poetry, of words and imagery quantumed on impressions of time-traveled jazz and its musical cousins: ...a train/less of thought than of quantum/solace, quantum locale... or what more he can do with a metaphor: ...boated whether/we came by train or/by bus... pulling together in just nine words the african diaspora, and vacation and holiday homecomings. because i prefer train travel i concentrated on that one strand, one of many strands mackey weaves in his ongoing poem. when slaves, on their way to freedom on the underground railroad, sang of a destination they might had sang of a train to jordan. in mackey's ongoing song there is neither place name, destination nor direction. there is the getting away, the going, for those who can as well as those who can't. and there's the telling, if told only by songs heard on a jukebox. so what say you? mackey saying: ...i was the what-sayer./ whatever he said i would/ say so what... jazz listeners will recall miles davis' call and refrain by the name of so what. say what? said.

Nathaniel Mackey has long been one of our most interesting poets. In Whatsaid Serif, he advances his long running poetic sequence "The Song of the Andoumboulou" another 19 pieces(according to the Dogon,the Andoumboulou are human beings created by a bumbling, incompetent, rookie god, beings who don't exactly correspond to the intended idea of the human; in other words, "they are us".)These poems feature a movement, both geographical and spiritual, across an African landscape rich in displacement, myth, and mystery, a train on tracks and a train of thought that yields many stunning phrases. Much of the language - a language that unifies thought and desire - is explicitely gnostic, of the sort that conflates eros and divinity. Robin Blaser writes of this book, accurately, that "Mackey's poem is a brilliant renewel of and experiment with the language of our spiritual condition and a measure of what poetry gives in trust -'heart's/meat' and the rush of language to bear it." This book has meant a great deal to me. I can't recommend it highly enough.