Blue Fasa

by Nathaniel Mackey

Overview

A stellar new collection of poems by “the Balanchine of the architecture dance” (The New York Times), and winner of the National Book Award in poetry.

Nathaniel Mackey’s sixth collection of poems, Blue Fasa, carries forward what the New Yorker has described as the “mythological conception” and “descriptive daring” of his two intertwined serial poems. A long song that's one and more than one, this collection takes its title from two related black musical traditions, a West African griot epic as told by the Fasa, a clan in ancient Ghana, and trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s hard bop classic “Blue Bossa,” influenced by the emergence of Brazilian bossa nova. The book opens with the catch of the heart and the call of romance, as it follows a band of travelers, refugees from history, on their incessant migrations through time, place, and polity toward a truer sense of being and belonging.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811224468
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/18/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	456 KB

About the Author

Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida in 1947. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, and has received many awards for his work, including the National Book Award in poetry for Splay Anthem, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, and the Bollingen Prize from the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Mackey is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University, and edits the literary journal Hambone.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

I RAG

A Night in Jaipur 3

Stick City Bhajan 6

Song of the Andoumboulou: 88 9

"An endless tunnel it seemed. So long…" 12

"Farewell said something, metafare some…" 15

Song of the Andoumboulou: 89 16

"As with the old-time people, the…" 18

"Like limbo but not as low, ludic…" 21

"Down on all fours, footless. Thus…" 22

Moment's Gnosis 23

"I was moment's novice. Bubbles…" 25

"No time soon would they've let…" 28

"Went on about of-the-moment…" 29

Song of the Andoumboulou: 91 30

"What he wouldn't have given, he was…" 34

Stick City Zazen 36

Song of the Andoumboulou: 93 39

"Insofar as there was a they the horns…" 41

"What did we know and when did…" 45

Anabatic Jukebox 46

"Sprung polity's pneumatic jukebox…" 48

"Stood happy-sad at the sonic window…" 52

Beginning "We the Migrating They" 53

Door Peep Shall Not Enter 61

"When it was we I saw I saw…" 63

Song of the Andoumboulou: 97 64

"The marine layer lay behind…" 66

"It was something Ed might've…" 67

"We pounded the heels of…" 68

Hofriyati Head Opening 70

"There were notes hung from…" 73

"A cracked head's hymnal sung…" 76

II RAG

Song of the Andoumboulou: 99 79

"Elegiac repose time cut…" 82

"'Please, please, Mr. Pinch,'…" 86

Song of the Andoumboulou: 991/2 87

Anacoluthic Light 89

"I fell into dreamless Adantean…" 93

"Touched but unable to seize…" 94

Song of the Andoumboulou: 101 95

"Dirt slid from cliffs as we…" 97

"Chthonic adornment lay…" 100

Oldtime Ending 101

"Stories told wanting to…" 103

The Overghost Ourkestra Plays for Lovers 106

"They were Mrs. Vex and Mr…" 108

"Had found themselves…" 110

Song of the Andoumboulou: 104 111

"What with Brother and Mrs…" 113

"The parking lot might have been…" 116

"We knew no other way to say…" 119

Song of the Andoumboulou: 104½ 120

Sound and Supplement 121

"Sopranino grimace, grin. A…" 124

"'No civic remit, no pantied…'" 127

Song of the Andoumboulou: 106 128

"Say-it-again said it again…" 130

Anabatic Ring Shout 131

Song of the Andoumboulou: 108 133

"A subdued cry caught in…" 136

"But my second body said…" 139

"I was love's own distant…" 140

Low Forest Rotation 141

"We were each caught with a…" 143

"Pine-branch batons fell into…" 146

"In soul's memory doffed hats…" 147

Song of the Andoumboulou: no 148

"Ohio fell away, we traveled…" 151

"Sophie moment more move than…" 153

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/20/2015
Mackey, winner of the 2006 National Book Award for poetry, “continues Nod House’s continuation of Splay Anthem and the work that came before it” as he extends two interwoven and ongoing serial poems: Song of Andoumboulou and “Mu.” Commanding in their cerebral and musical reach, the poems do not require knowledge of previous installments, though hints to the themes here are found in the collection’s title, which references the West African griot tradition and jazz trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s song “Blue Bossa.” Mackey’s epic mode is one in which place, time, and personae collide and shapeshift, rendering a definitive origin or conclusion somewhat irrelevant. Indeed, this collection opens with a fraying of the self, first pulled apart by love, as the bereft narrator laments, “Insofar, this/ was to say, as there was an I it was/ no other, of late letting go no getting/ out. I saw myself I saw, no parallel/ track.” The “Insofar-I” construction reverberates throughout as quasimythic travelers are shaped and taken apart by forces personal, historical, environmental, and metaphysical. What exists always exists in relationship to its negation, opening an elastic space in which form and dissolution maintain a fast-paced, flexible dialectic dance. Mackey tracks a knowledge “gone by the time we heard/ it, galactic light’s late arrival/ an acoustic stand-in, light-year-like/ but shrunken. Moment’s remit/ an/ odd sonic perfume.” The book itself follows in this pattern of continual departures, sustained in Mackey’s remarkable erudition and singular lyric virtuosity. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Nathaniel Mackey is a poet of ongoingness involved in a king of spiritualist or cosmic pursuit."

The Washington Post - Edward Hirsch

"Nathaniel Mackey's poetry ambitiously continues an American bardic line that unfolds from Leaves of Grass to Pound's Cantos to H.D.'s Trilogy to Olson's The Maximus Poems, winds through the whole of Robert Duncan's work, and extends beyond all of these. Mackey's words go where music goes: a brilliant and major accomplishment."

Lines of Affinity - Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Citation - Don Share

"Nathan Mackey's ongoing serial projects in poetry and prose over the past three and a half decades arrow among the great wonders of our literary moment."

Poetry Foundation - Robert Polito

06/15/2015
Mackey's hip, dense language is cued to a global soundtrack as he reengages with two serial poems that snake through his earlier works: "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu." Improvisation is key, as is surrender to the journey, in this meandering saga of Pynchon-esque characters enveloped in strains of "Blue Bossa" (a jazz standard written by Kenny Dorham): "Something Vedic on the box,/ box or no box, sat ourselves/ down siphoning music./ Place played harmonium." Motifs recur, punctuated by a car crash: the polysemic stick city (as in the poem "Stick City Zazen"); the subhuman, subterranean Andoumboulou creatures of myth invented by the Fasa of Ghana; mu as the root of many words, including muse; the Zar cult of Sudan; incessant movement. The box—juke, boom, radio—is the life that one carries through an endless odyssey of migration: "with a box on our head we called/ home,/ box more hat than/ home." Mackey has won numerous honors, including a National Book Award for Splay Anthem in 2006. His work evokes overtones of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Michael Ondaatje, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Don Cherry—the list may be endless. VERDICT A tale of improvisation and continuation whose poetics are a trip in every sense of that word.—Ellen Kaufman, New York

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