Breath and Precarity

by Nathaniel Mackey

"If 'I can't breathe' seems to have become the awful refrain of the age, a repeated corroboration of expendability and helplessness, Mackey reminds us that black culture has long been imbued with a profound sense of the fragility of life. The 'radical pneumaticism' of black musicóin which saxophonists such as Ben Webster and Sonny Rollins extravagantly foreground the mechanics of their breathing as they play, as though to 'insist upon and belabor' the indispensability of respirationóis not only an aesthetics but also a political commentary on social precarity. Compact and muted as it may be, how can Mackey's lecture be described as anything other than breathtaking, when it forces us to 'hover,' to pause, to wonder at the 'transient boon' of the next breath we're about to take?"--Brent Hayes Edwards Poetry. African & African American Studies.

Genres: Poetry

32 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2021

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

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

9 ‘A poetics of breath is all the more palpably evident in black music, particularly the music of wind instruments, a radical pneumaticism in which the involuntary is rendered deliberate, labored, in which breath is belabored, made strange. Breath becomes tactical, tactile, textile, even textual, a haptic recension whose jagged disbursements auger distress.’

11 ‘Is it the precariousness of breath, its being provisional, without guarantee’

20 ‘The exulting in breath and breathing I mentioned earlier is nowhere more evident than in the use of circular breathing in jazz, where it has a greater prominence than in any other Western musical idiom. Horn players use this technique to produce a continuous tone without interruption, a kind of hyper-pneumaticism, which they accomplish by breathing in through the nose while simultaneously expelling air stored in the cheeks through the mouth. The technique’s origins are said to lie among thirteen-century Mongolian metal smiths whose work with gold and silver required maintaining a pipe-sustained flame for an uninterrupted ten to thirty minutes.’

23 ‘Black music says, as does an allied, radically pneumatic poetics, that breath, especially imperilled breath, matters. It insists that we can, for a time at least, breathe, that what we do with breath, from which, to belabor the obvious, animacy, agency and all the possibility of action arise, matters most.’

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a more sane society Nathaniel Mackey's lyric on the Stewart/Garner/et. al. murders, "The Overghost Ourkestra's Next," would be on all our lips, I heard myself turning the last page say, these pages being the lecture inaugurating the Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics, a meditation this on Olson's projective breath, breath in Sonny Rollins, circular breath, figure to ground, Mackey's own speech in his novels that aestheticize the band concept: "band" becomes a representative collectivity possible in art -- where such gallows signifying carries a "radical pneumaticism" or "zen bluesism": "These matters resonate with the long state of siege to which black folks have been subjected, a long history crystallized most recently by Eric Garner's last words, 'I can't breathe,' and the rendering of a statement by Fritz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks that it's been brought into alignment with in recent months, 'We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breath.'"