Cartoon by Kim Warp
Yet poetry seemed capacious enough for both approaches to history: making it up and plumbing its depths. Returning to âChant des Andoumboulouâ gave Mackey âa 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.â He began moving away from poems as discrete pieces of writingâthe 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 âpulling more and more songâ out of an old piece of music. His poetry began scouring historiesâthe ill-fated Andoumboulou, Sufi mysticism, Gnosticism. In the early seventies, he found a copy of âMu,â an album by the trumpeter Don Cherry. In Mackeyâs mind, the title, and Cherryâs primal, ecstatic music, filled with huffing and puffing, echoed Olsonâs fascination with the mouth and âmuthologists,â the rhythms of breath that had been central to Black Mountain writing. âIf they werenât talking to each other,â he said, âyou know I was going to get them to talk to each other.â