Whatsaid Serif

by Nathaniel Mackey

Whatsaid Serif , Nathaniel Mackey’s third book of poems, is comprised of installments sixteen through thirty-five of Song of the Andoumboulou , an ongoing serial work whose first fifteen installments appear in Eroding Witness and School of Udhra , his two previous books. Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and livid apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kakapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology, are “a rough draft of human being,” that “the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft.” The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration’s putative angel itself. "Nathaniel Mackey's poem is a brilliant renewal of and experiment with the language of our spiritual condition and a measure of what poetry gives in trust—'heat's/mean' and the rush of language to bear it."—Robin Blaser "Mackey's raspy rebus-like cultural resurfacings are both beautiful to read and worthy of repeated efforts at comprehension."— Publishers Weekly Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers’ Award, is the author of School of Udhra and Atet A.D. , both also published by City Lights Publishers. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006, was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2014, and won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2015. He teaches a poetry workshop at Duke University.

Genres: Poetry, American

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida. He received a BA degree from Princeton University and a PhD from Stanford University.

Nathaniel Mackey has received numerous awards including a Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. Mackey currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Whatsaid Serif last in my study of the works of Nathaniel Mackey, and while Eroding Witness may be in introduction to his work, and Splay Anthem a climax, Whatsaid serif stands somewhere in the middle, illuminating his emphasis on music, multiculturalism and wordplay while continuing the serial poems of the Songs of Andoumboulou. One of the unique elements to this work was, that because of the overall structure of the work, one could almost read vertically as well as horizontally Reading certain words that were indented vertically we get sentances such as:
Heard feet on high…B’legless. a ghost hummed alphabet school I grumped heartbreak… While seemingly nonsensical at first, when reading some of this poem’s lines horizontally such as beneath “crosshaired hoisted in green light…” it doesn’t seem too much different. The subject matter of Whatsaid Serif is similar to Splay Anthem,though I would say Splay Anthem takes it not only in a somewhat darker, more final direction, but also plays it against the series of Mu poems the Mackey has written as well. The title perhaps says more about it then I can, however. The simple yet obscure concepts of how a seri may speak to you, or even if it is a synecdoche for certain barriers of language as a whole, would do far more than I can offer in a review to sum of Mackey's works.

[Wes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nathaniel Mackey is one of the best contemporary poets I have read..

[Amber Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beginningless book thought to’ve
unrolled endlessly, more scroll
than book, talismanic strum. (Song of Andoumboulou: 23)

[sam °❀⋆.ೃ࿔* · Rating 4 out of 5]

wood as water, many as one