Nathaniel Mackey.

Nathaniel Mackey. Whatsaid Serif. San Francisco: City Lights, 1998 112 pp $1295

Whatsaid Serif Nathaniel Mackey's third full-length body of poetry, presents us with twenty-one recently made known installments of the innovative, ongoing serial metrical composition Song of the Andoumboulou, a work whose earlier motions appeared in Mackey's first pair books of poetry, Eroding Witness (U of Illinois P 1985) and instruct of Udhra (City Lights, 1993) The Andoumboulou are a somewhat shadowy the bulk of mankind alluded to in the cosmology of the Dogon commonalty of Mali. Originally dwelling in area later to be settl by dint of the Dogon, the Andoumboulou were small r clan "an earlier, flawed or failed form of human being"--or, as Mackey nurses to think of them, "a unwrought draft of human beings." The Andoumboulou are incomplete, unfinished, and thereby ponder a wider human condition: As Mackey places it, "the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rugged draft." Whatsaid Serif, then, is a work of poems about change, motion and becoming. Mackey's is not a conventional poetic; he works within the avant-garde tradition of modernist and postmodern ist poesy in the vein of early Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Clarence Major, or--to expand the musical analogies of which he himself is fond--in the tradition of cutting-edge jazz players in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as Anthony Braxton and Pharoah Sanders. Mackey's verse is "difficult" for those who demand that numbers present a straightforward record of experience and emotion. on the other hand for those willing to go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of Mackey's work in its musical twists, cross-cultural descends and self-relexive coils, Whatsaid Serif moves an exhilarating ride.

Whatsaid Serif's actual title exemplifies Mackey's eclectic poetic practice. Whatsaid call outs that what-sayer storyteller of the Carib-speaking Kalapalo population of Brazil. The what-sayer appears again and again in Whatsaid Serif, sometimes as a questioning figure ("except the what-sayer, / obsess asking what. 'Was it a woman / he one time was in love with?' 'Was it a lie / he'd protracted since put it all behind?' ") sometimes as a humorous the same ("I was the what-sayer. / Whatever he said I would / say to such a degree what"; or, "He said he would say / nothing. I whatever popp into my / head"). Serif is a word of dim origin, denoting one of those fiddly lines at the top or bottom of a printed alphabetic character Seriff, however, is a variant of Shereef, an Arabic word of shrewd resonance: It literally means 'noble, glorious,' and denotes a descendant of Muhamet and, according to implication, a Muslim priest, the rule of Morocco or one of his provincial subordinates, a Muslim prince in general, and the chief magistrate of Mecca. In united phrase--Whatsa id Serif--Mackey encompasses improvements Arabic, African, and Brazilian, as well as to [i]or[/i] at a great depth rooted indigenous narrative practices and the irreducibly graphic nature of writing and, by the agency of poststructuralist implication, language itself. (Mackey has oral of what he sees as "the Dogon emphasis forward signs, traces, drawings, 'graphicity.'")

In the metrical compositions of Whatsaid Serif, the word itself is migratory, shifting. Everything, in fact, is upon the move, for this is a part of passages, of migration, of hejira. The "speaker" of the poems--and his actual identity is mobile, evanescent--sits in bars, lolls and other places of transcience ("the lengthy / Night Lounge," "Wrack Tavern / Inn of Many Monikers") simultaneously moving ("It was a train we were in succession / peripatetic tavern we / were in, mind unremittingly elsewhere"). Places shift, as do prevailing styles of transportation: "It was a train / in southern Spain we / were forward It was a train outside Sao / Paulo in succession our way to Algeciras we / were forward A train / less of allowing than of quantum / solace, quantum locale train / gotten on in Miami"--Mackey's confess birthplace--"long since gone." But "What had been a train was now a / bus between Fez and Tetuan," a bus which shifts bewilderingly back to a train, bus again, and then boat: "Whatever it was it / was a boat we were upon bus we were / forward sat on a train orbiti ng abject / Earth...." The itinerary of this journey--spiritual, cultural, sexual--is single in kind of the imagination rather than of Rand McNally (there are no bus lines, heaven knows, running between Sao Paulo and Algeciras!). The travelers' destination isn't quite clear: It may be the "eventual city known as By-and-By," it may be Zar ("the lazy asymptotic arrival we / glimpsed," also known as "Raz," "Arz," and "Zra"), or it may be an Star, which shifts to "Rast," "Tsar," and, in the title of Whatsaid Serif s second section, "Stra." And quite through this journey, playing from the tape machine or from unnamed sources, there is music--blues music, jazz, Brazilian music, Arabic music--which itself is the motion:

Gnostic sleeper stowed

away on

the boat we rode runaway sunship, Trane's

namesake music's runaway ghost

Posthumous

music made us almost weep, wander,

Soon-Come Congres we'd other wise have

been, sung to if not from Lenore by

Eronel

each which way, on our way

out