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Morton Marcus: This is KUSP Santa Cruz community sponsored radio. This is the Poetry Show and I'm Mort Marcus. First, before I start to give you our guest for the day, I'd like to thank Plaza

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Books on Pacific Avenue for its generous donation that makes this program possible. Also, I would like to say that I have been looking forward to this day for a long time, and the jazz introduces a fellow colleague here at KUSP, has his own show,

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we'll talk about that in a second. But a man who I know as more than a disc jockey, but as one of the really fine poets in America today, and that is Nathaniel Mackey. Nate, welcome to the show.

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Nathaniel Mackey: Hi, glad to be here. Morton Marcus: Nate, as I'm making sure that my professionalism of the board works. He knew that his voice would not come over since I had not turned him on yet. Nate,

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we're here for several reasons. We've been trying to get this together for almost a year. Nathaniel Mackey: Yes. Morton Marcus: But very two joyous events: one local, which

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is a reading that you're going to give tonight at Sweet Williams and which I will talk about later on. But another, the issuance in the national poetry series, that is the United States National Poetry Series of your first book, "Eroding

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Witness." And it is a beautiful book, put out by the University of Illinois Press and selected by one of my favorite poets and an old friend, Mike Harper. Congratulations. Nathaniel Mackey: Thank you.

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Morton Marcus: We will be talking about the book and we will be reading from it. But before we start, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, and why you are in Santa Cruz?

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Nathaniel Mackey: Well, I was born in Florida, but grew up in California, and lived- most of my life has been lived here in California and I've gone away for various reasons. And I've been in Santa Cruz for, I guess, about six or seven years now. I

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came here in '79 to teach up at the university in the literature department and that's what brings me here, that and KUSP. Morton Marcus: That's real loyalty. What are the courses that you actually teach up at UC?

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Nathaniel Mackey: I teach a variety of things. I teach both through the literature board and the American Studies program. I do a course for the latter on Afro-American culture, and I do courses in Afro-American literature for the literature

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board. I teach a course on the Harlem Renaissance, for example. And also do courses in 20th century American literature, especially poetry. I've done some creative writing courses. And I'm getting into, in recent years, doing some more

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comparative courses. I do a course that covers Latin American and Caribbean as well as U.S. writers. And I'm also right now doing a course on literature, the English-speaking Caribbean. So it's- I've done some other things, some single

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author courses, I've done a course on HD. I've done some courses on the so-called Black Mountain poets and contemporary American poets. And that just about covers it, I think. Morton Marcus: Who do you think your influences are? You

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mentioned the Black Mountain poets and I, when you said that, I tried to connect the poems of yours with them and I can't- I can do it because poem is language, but I can't make a connection beyond that point. Who are the poets who influenced

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you? Nathaniel Mackey: Well, I guess the easiest way to say- to talk about that would be to say that -- aside from the sort of standard poets, usually of the past, that I became acquainted

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with in high school and so on and so forth -- the first real 20th century poets that I read were William Carlos Williams, and Amiri Baraka, at that time was known as Leroy Jones, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and those would have

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been the first poets I read seriously. And this would have been like, in my late teens, and from there I went, you know, pretty much everywhere, you know, the big poets and going back in time and picking up people like people writing in

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other languages. Although, for the most part, I've gotten into the translation of the Negritude poets, some Spanish poets like Lorca, so on and so forth, going back to some 19th century figures as well.

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Morton Marcus: The first poets you mentioned really do zero in on language and are very precise in their use of language. And one of the things that caught my ear immediately when I first heard you read was the absolute beautiful music in your poems,

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so rather than have this whole talk, why don't we start off with a poem so that the people out there can hear. I do want to say that I announced that this was a National Poetry Series selection, that is quite an honor because the National

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Poetry Series, as the listeners may or may not know, is a series that was more or less donated with starting money around two hundred thousand dollars by James Michener, to keep the art of poetry going, and it's totally controlled from

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Washington. And the best poets around select, either by jury or individually, poets they think deserve this book. So it is a real big congratulations, I want to let the listener out there know that. Anyway, here is Nate Mackey, and listen for the music

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out there. Nathaniel Mackey: Well, I'll read one poem from the first section, or maybe a couple, I don't know, I'll read one and we'll see what happens after that. The first section of the

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book, the book is called, "Eroding Witness," and this one is called: GRISGRIS DANCER, and Grisgris o course, is a form of magic tha comes out of the Afro-America tradition, especially in place

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Backwardswalking twoheaded woman. Bony feet down to which I like New Orleans, but generall throughout the South, Grigor being a form of Voodoo and so o and so forth and I think that' all you need to know

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bow but will not be spared. Stored pressings of earth and its red way sourced in its own embrace, all the grudges of time. All the gathered ache of our severed selves, all the windowless light. And of the Beyond, that the witnesses lie

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gratefully goes without telling. That the aberrant earth, overrun by birds and unshod of all image, greets a manyfisted sun. That the backwardswalking woman, taking up through the air by the scruff of her neck by hoisted snakeskin towropes, hurries back

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down to be one with us, begins again, gone up in smoke. Morton Marcus: You mentioned that these poems have, you know, Afro-American roots and certainly, "Grisgris" and a lot of the other titles in the book, show your concern with culture

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and history, and especially the history of black Africa, as it is even connected with Egypt because I know there are a lot of poems in here to the gods, which I will get to later. So I'm happy that you're explaining some of these terms for people

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out there who will not know them, but this is a poem steeped in roots and it's something- a poetry steeped in roots, and it's something that is very, very close to my heart because I am always talking about the roots, that the poet should get

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back to his own roots. And in fact, about a year ago I had Al Young on here, and we were talking quite a lot about this. Anyway, Nate, could you read another one from the series? Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah, a lot of it comes out of folklore. Some

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of it- some of it through reading, although in many cases, readings I've done have simply confirmed or elaborated on things that I heard growing up as a kid because the folklore, in a lot of instances, likes to talk about Gris-gris and Voodoo

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and stuff like that which was a part of the culture. Morton Marcus: And you were growing up in Florida, right? Nathaniel Mackey: Well, I grew up in California after -- I think we came out here when I was about five -- so my mother's

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from Georgia and her grandmother- her mother was born in Georgia. And my father was born in Panama, though he's Bahamian and his parents wer there for the building of the canal, and they migrated the e from the Bahamas. So where we

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ived, first moved to Califor ia, was a kind of displaced So thern- I mean, there it is- I mean, it was like most of t e people there were from- in the community we grew up in, at lea t for the first few years here, which was here in Northern Calif

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rnia in a little place called Ro eo, which is over right off the San Pablo Bay. Most of the pe ple there were displaced Southe ners, there were a lot of peop e from Texas and Mississippi an Alabama, and we were from Flor da. So though we were here, wha

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we brought with us was still ery much alive. And it informed onversation and beliefs, turns o phrase, and so on and so for h. So, there is that substratum in much of what influenced my riting and just my whole

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Morton Marcus: Right, again, it's not just reading, though, a you said, it is something tha is lived and felt and that i where its experience comes t the reader. Anyway, let's go on Nathaniel Mackey: Okay. I'll read another from the first

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section, it's called: BLACK SNAKE VISITATION, and it is a poem that I wrote a few years ago and dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, whose biography by David Henderson, another poet that I had read, and I was

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struck by a dream that Hendrix had a couple days before he died that seemed to be a premonition of his death. And the poem grew out of that. The black tantric snake I dream two days to the morning I

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die slipping up through my t roat slithers out like the v mit, I'll be choked by, can't, igantic, seven-headed snake ticks out one head at a time. ust be this hiss my guitar has een rehearsing, sits me down by here the salt water crosses the

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weet. Self-searching twitch, the scrawny light of its carriage, broken sea-lit starkness for the sea of regrets. But not reduced by what I knew would not matter, woke to see no one, caress the arisen wonder's dreamt-of thigh. Death enters a slack circ

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e whispering, slapping hand , beauty baited like a hook, hu t muse whose feet, whatever foo I'd give goes abruptly bad. Mus be this hiss my guitar's been ehearsing, lizard-quick tongues like they were licking the sky. Must be this hiss my guitar has

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been rehearsing, these lizard-quick tongues like they were licking the sky. Down on my knees, testing notes with my teeth, always knew a day'd I'd p t my wings out and fly. Morton Marcus: And that was the actual dream.

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Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah, the dream of this snake coming up out of his throat, a seven-headed snake. Morton Marcus: And very tantric. Yes, the whole chakras is even in the number. It's amazing.

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Nathaniel Mackey: Mhm. Let's see, I'll read a little bit from another section of the book. There's a section of the book, the second section of the book is taken up with an ongoing series of poems called, "Song of the Andoumboulou," which comes

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out of the Dogon culture of Mali. And I got interested in that culture, which is very fascinating, by way of a book that's quoted at various points in this volume, a book by a French anthropologist named Marcel Griaule called,

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"Conversations with Ogotemmeli," Ogotemmeli being an old Dogon sage. And, "The Song of Andoumboulou," is a song of the spirits that they use in their various rituals, primarily the funeral rites. So anyway, that's a series that got going and it t

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kes up the second section of t e book, and I'll read a bit of t at. Morton Marcus: These are actually your songs of the Andoumboulou?

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Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah, yeah, they're not- they incorporate- one of the things I'm interested in in my writing and [unintelligible] just in general is mixes and layering. And so what comes into these poems is not only aspects of Dogon belief

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and mythology that's been picked up, but also belief in mythology from other cultures, other African cultures, both on the continent of Africa and there's places like Cuba stuff and thing of the sort of, say, Grigris which really is displace

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African beliefs in this country And that comes into it, but it' sort of layered with aspects o personal experience, observe things and stuff like that, s it's- the connections and th layering that matter the most t me. Let me read a few of these

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"You speak of 'making' people believe. Was there then something secret, which they were not to know?" "If you wanted to explain what happened to someone who knew nothing about it, to an ordinary man, you would say that a power

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came down from heaven to eat the old man and change his bones into beneficent stones." "But what is the truth? If one were to explain it to you, a Nazarene, one would say that someone came down from heaven

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like a woman with a woman's dress and ornaments and ate the old man, and that the stones are not his bones but her ornaments." And that's taken as an epigraph from Marcel Griaule's book that

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I mentioned and it's a bit of dialogue between him and Ogotemmeli. SONG OF THE ANDOUMBOULOU: 1 The song says the dead will not ascend without song. That

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because if we lure them their names get our throats, the word sticks. As not more than a week before when she did, that it read they'd return, turn out one day, our mouths touch, tutor me, teach me this thirst. Then in the eighth book warned of a Sea,

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that it brings them in, that born of waves, a wash of words inside our throats, its bottomless voice's brew of stems turns our insides out... Or li e these new ones they explai , these others, "fish that walk n land," the signs are old m

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n drunk on sidewalks, mumbler ... The dead, they say, are dyin of thirst, not even words. Ex ept it says itself for days in our head. And that voice, the ook says, drink some blood but And let me do:

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ill tell you the dead don't wan us bled, but to be sung. And she said the same, but a thin isp of soul, but I want the mea of my body sounded. Drummed, I put in, played upon by hands, h rs, made a "priest" of... Fac s, run out by water. Features wa

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te and reappear. Boathouses ha nt the fog, horns gossip. Hea s nod, maracas. Emptied out of ll but SONG OF THE ANDOUMBOULOU: 2, and get out of this section. The nubbed white remains of her hands. Surrounds herself with

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easy men. A moist hole matted with hair. And who are they, whose attentions she prolongs but won't remember? Always scrubbed, rehearsed, regretted, forgiven like a whore forgives her body. And at always the same hour, the same angle, the same

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thickness, the same shadow crosses the ground. And arm goes forward. Each finger finds its limit. The distance persists, like a grudge. And as you come to where she does, to where the sky walks houses cave in, even caves collapse. Her hands get

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back their fingers, wind in your teeth as you grin, you want kisses, tell lies. Lies, then twist her lips, whose frown you test, her chapped mouth. Cool thumbs lubricate the hinge of her thigh. On down the street she does a dance, turns, throws

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her ass, the ocean in it. An enclosure. Each wave is as to grasp is an enclosure. Others of it fade, let go as waste the tides pull up, the moon takes. Wet sand and water wet our feet, all shore dissolves, as at our bed's edge each finger works the

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ribs of broken ships. Morton Marcus: Well, let me ask you a question here. I know this is a female figure and, as far as I can see, it's metamorphosizing.

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Nathaniel Mackey: Mhm. Morton Marcus: What about this female figure? Nathaniel Mackey: What about? Morton Marcus: I mean, it seems to me that it moves almost from

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the female figure, almost a tribal woman, and finally becomes the sea in the end. Nathaniel Mackey: Well, it's a female figure who is identified with the sea, which is- and is depicted as living under the

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sea, and her hair, holding various tribal secrets, in a sense, the sense that our hair is matted and dirtied by broken taboos and so forth. And it's the job of the poet, shaman figure in this culture, to descend into the underworld, or

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the underwater, and comb out that woman figure's hair, that Goddess' hair, who was unable to comb out her own hair because her fingers, or hands, have no fingers. She can't hold the comb. So it's- yeah, it does metamorphose into the sea

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because it's, I mean, in many ways, she is the singer. Morton Marcus: What I was trying to get at and wanted to hear you describe it -- you're probably not too happy that I put it that way -- is the layering, is this idea of one figure, one image

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moving into another and these images, because -- and I'm not telling you, I'm telling the listener -- very archetypal, and really works beautifully. In the first one, if I may, I'm always trying to find, you know, lines that a poet really defines what

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he's doing and who he is. There are some of it, again, "the dead don't want us bled, but to be sung." And that seems to me what Nate Mackey is doing in his poetry. Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah. Well, I think that's- I think that's

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accurate but there's a sense of, as you say, roots and ancestry in relationship to the spirits and the dead. And the concern with history and the past comes across in that particular way, as well as some other ways. And singing is a form of honoring

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that transmission as an ages-old tradition that I'm a part of. Morton Marcus: How about another one of these songs if you want to read them, and they're fascinating, they're beautiful too.

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Nathaniel Mackey: Okay, let's see. Well, actually, I have some more recent ones- Morton Marcus: Oh, great. Nathaniel Mackey: -that I could read.

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Morton Marcus: Sure well- okay, is that what you want to do? I just want you to be aware that we've got plenty of time so you don't have to rush through anything here. Nathaniel Mackey: Well, it's funny because I guess I wrote

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that poem because recently, and even though that particular poem was written years ago, I recently in this, "Song of the Andoumboulou," series, had occasion to come back to that, in passing, to come back to that figure.

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Morton Marcus: The woman got us [unintelligible]- Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah, the underwater woman. And this is called: SONG OF THE ANDOUMBOULOU: 12, and it's got a title, ITERANT

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ANGEL, Again, what speaks of speaking, boxed in but at its edge alludes to movement, loses us, flight, finds its voice between bleeding lips bitten into, the pointlessness of going on. Under

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its breath between promises mutters what it would sow, that only glimpse of what once I reach after it vanishes, foxes' feet, zigzag slip. Fell asleep underwater, it felt like, phantom ledge, faint bodies drop. Drawn up dredged

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archipelago, acapella grunt, pebbles under one stone. Again we begin to move, reading rock, receding wall. Wandering stone, something whispered in my ear, lost course. Bent voice, an evaporative kiss, wet quivering lip, quick bit of emptiness

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better when window I peeked in through, rope unraveling, turned me, torn, unstrung. Knew what once we'd have thought would be the last if it wasn't, spells we cast caught up in vacuous babble, tossed about by wind. Reached in with fishbone

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fingers, combed out the underwater woman's hair. Thread of nothingness, needle of light I laid hands on, lidless, lip-split, stitched. Infectious wind strong with lepers' bells trails sermon, twisted neck, net bursting with light, ominous

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mouthful, taste of its ripeness, bested by warnings, arrived wasted, turned back. Looked into as the last eye closes, furtively lit by what one already knew. Without remedy, up all night, two nights before, strict motionless engine,

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sugared sweat, wet hair, one's pillow, spoken of as if spoken for, that we each know an alternate ending, move to speak, mouth wired shut, mute lure, blind, mystic light, lost aura, he raised itself, stuttered, wouldn't say what.

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Morton Marcus: Well, that certainly does pick up a lot of the images from the last one, very interesting. Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah. Morton Marcus: And in this one, you do manage to straighten the

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hair. Nathaniel Mackey: So stringing the hair in a poem that's very much concerned with the limits of what that straightening can do in terms of articulation. I guess, like a lot of writers,

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the limits of language are, in many ways, as much a muse as the possibilities or the capabilities of language for me. I mean, just speaking on- speaking about, well, what can be spoken about, and also speaking about what can't be

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spoken about, and trying to negotiate some kind of conversation between those two realms. And in that, in that particular poem, I was speaking of it in a much more self-conscious way at points than, say, in some of the

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earlier stuff. Morton Marcus: Well, in my glib way, I said: When you become a poet is when you realize what you want to say you can't say in words.

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Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah, yeah. Morton Marcus: And then you got to figure out the ways to do it. Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah, yeah. I've been reading- re-reading Whitman in the last several months because I'm giving some

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lectures on Whitman up at the New College in San Francisco later this month. And I'm just struck by how often that particular cry comes out of him that he can't really say what he wants to say.

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Morton Marcus: But he tries to, he tries- Nathaniel Mackey: Given the- just the volume of what [cross talk], it's an amazing sort of thing to hear, confession to hear coming from him.

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Morton Marcus: It is- I want to just say one thing about Whitman before we go on: it is interesting that American poetry has moved away from his whole method which is voluminous, and has come to really be a kind of poetry which cuts things out and

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uses understatements, no overstatement. Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah. Morton Marcus: And yet he is really is the poet who points us in the direction of what American poetry should be.

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Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah. Morton Marcus: And yet no one uses the method. Nathaniel Mackey: Yeah, yeah, I think it's partly that that's the 19th century, and we don't quite feel as, I don't know, the

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kind of optimistic- Morton Marcus: Expansive. Nathaniel Mackey: -expansiveness that was a part of that century, certainly can only be felt as problematic this time anymore.

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Morton Marcus: Well, okay, let's go on and read. As a matter of fact, let's have one more poem, and then we're going to take a break, and we'll be back within around three minutes. Nathaniel Mackey: Okay.

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Morton Marcus: So this is Nate Mackey, and he is our guest today on the Poetry Show. Nate? Nathaniel Mackey: Let me read a poem that is in the third section of this book. It actually was- came out a few

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years ago as the first chapbook I published, it was in a book of four poems called, "Four for Trane." And as the title suggests, it's poems in memory of and dedicated to John Coltrane. And this one was the last one of that four, and it's

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called -- and the longest -- and it's called: OHNEDARUTH'S DAY BEGUN, and Ohnedaruth, for listeners who don't know, was a name given to John Coltrane after he died by his wife, Alice and was the kind of, I think of it as a kind of

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mystical praise name in the African tradition that would go, say, back all the way back to Egypt. And there's an epigraph that- actually a quote from George Oppen from one of his poems, four words, a four-line, four-word phrase "bright light

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of shipwreck," that serves as the sort of subtitle for this poem. There I sit afloat in the Boat of Years, a thin ellipsoid breath against the roof of my mouth pressed to modulate pitch,

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reed lipped across time to 've been wormlike earth, to become a navigable sludge. Sixty-eight days to my fourty-first year, this endless dwelling on air, the key to a courtyard filled with talkers, tongues in hand, bush fled by birds whose wings

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burn, air, love's abrasive hush. These bird-gods anoint me with camphor, escort me through each a more private room, the chronic juices of lust flood an ended earth whose beckoned image burns on. Still I see no light, no letting go of my remorse come

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shining through, this unruly wail a not-so-thickly-veiled prayer, you Anubikc sisters, not a harp, no fingers pluck played on by wind. [cut-off].