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Nathaniel Mackey's Long Song | The New Yorker


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Yet poetry seemed capacious enough for both approaches to history: making it up and plumbing its depths. Returning to “Chant des Andoumboulou” gave Mackey “a sense of society as a kind of poem, social ritual as a kind of poem. So, therefore, the poem as a kind of society, made up of elements like sound, and sense, and the look words have on a page, the look line breaks give to a poem.” He began moving away from poems as discrete pieces of writing—the sealed-off odes that we are taught in school. He thought of how the musicians he loved, like Coltrane or Cecil Taylor, the avant-garde pianist, were always “pulling more and more song” out of an old piece of music. His poetry began scouring histories—the ill-fated Andoumboulou, Sufi mysticism, Gnosticism. In the early seventies, he found a copy of “Mu,” an album by the trumpeter Don Cherry. In Mackey’s mind, the title, and Cherry’s primal, ecstatic mus ....

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