Nathaniel Mackey

As a poet, Mackey has developed a style of writing that synthesizes his influences from African mythopoetics to American jazz to innovative American poetics. His epistolary novels work also as essay and poetics, charting a travelling musician. His essays have charted a poetics of stutter that connects bebop to lyric poetry and seeks to provide an alternative to conventionally understood Western metaphysics. He has committed his poetry to tracking sound, homonyms, echoes of syllables. The development of his poems, line by line, phrase by phrase, comes first out of sonic resemblances; thematics come later. For four decades Mackey has been constructing an imaginative whole, text by text, the coherence of this project has gradually become evident. Whatever changes one might note between one book and another, the overall effect is that of a made world that now seems inevitable, though five decades ago it was unimaginable.