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Woodland Pattern™    Book   Center		Nathaniel Mackey Poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey works in the open form of New American Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. For Mackey the poetry and music of many cultures are closely intertwined. A noted scholar of jazz, African, Latin American, and Caribbean mythologies and histories, the ritual energies of these cultures inform his poetry, which question boundaries and enact a correspondence across these cultures—denying codifications of what it means to be a writer.

excerpted from Song of the Andoumboulou: 26 in Whatsaid Serif Nathaniel Mackey

Nastic swell. Gnostic dispatch.      Stripped limbs would be arms and   legs were wood water, mixed           metamorphic flow. Leafless        book,   blank watery pages,   there     to be written on if he       could...   Champagne would be sea-foam,   green grapes nominal white,     white roses mean what white       roses mean, this the   what-sayer's      ta'wil... They would be we,       twinless,   bane he bore witness to.   Grain of sand and of salt       mechanical twinship     overlooked... Gremlin.   Luddite   ghost

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