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, fi