#nathaniel mackey

[edwordsmyth]

Nathaniel Mackey

[noleavestoblow]

“While we’re alive,” we kept repeating. Tongues, throats, roofs of our mouths bone dry, skeletons we’d someday be…

Panicky masks we wore for effect more than effect, more real than we’d admit…

No longer wanting to know what soul was, happy to see

shadow, know touch… Happy to have sun at our backs, way led by shadow, happy to have bodies…"

-Nathaniel Mackey

[thelonguepuree]

It’s hard to say what it was, why it was wouldly subsidence took this occasion to exact wouldly ledge. My guess is that the air of anticlimactic futurity pervading this town had something to do with it, the datedness of what was once thought of as “things to come.” I’m referring, of course, to the Space Needle. That the future has no place in which to arrive but the present, that its arrival is thus oxymoronic, is the sort of reflection one can’t help entertaining in the shadow of such a monument as that—a monument, when it was built, to the future, a future it prematurely memorialized, prematurely entombed. Today it’s more properly a monument to the past, a reminder of the times in which it was built, tomb to the elapsed expectancy it all turns out to’ve been. I remember my aunt and uncle driving up for the World’s Fair twenty years ago—hopelessly long ago it seems now.

Nathaniel Mackey, Atet A.D.

[bostonpoetryslam]

I like interruptions. I like the writing to be situated within the realm of my ordinary life.

Nathaniel Mackey, interviewed by Hua Hsu for the New Yorker

[thebeatifulones]

“This was writing that indicated a curriculum I could follow,” Fred Moten told me. Earlier that day, Moten had been teaching a course on Pan-Africanism and performance at New York University. “I read two pages of ‘Atet A.D.’ to my class. It wasn’t because I planned to do it. It’s because the road I had been thinking led me there,” in turn leading the class back to Mackey. “There’s this formulation about Shakespeare, where everything is in Shakespeare. I would say, everything might be in Shakespeare, but it’s all in Nate. ‘Everything’ is a counting term. This plus this plus this. ‘All’ is a mass word. It’s not about the coalescence of separable things. It’s all. Nate makes you understand the difference between ‘everything’ and ‘all.’ ”

[carpentrix]

Does an ultimate landing place exist? Or are we always arriving, always Arriving, falling, faltering, flying, to land once more, then fall again? Our dreams offer glimpses of what could be, visions that can change what we know and how we exist in the waking world where we live. We fall asleep, sink into our dreams, and rise, ascend, Arrive, wake up.

For the Paris Review Daily, the third essay in a series on the sky looks at black holes, tigers, and dreams, and what we can and cannot know, asking where does the sky end?

[The Flammarion engraving, unknown artist. First appeared in Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire, 1888]

[jacobwren]

The theoretically inclined, he realized, would argue that being held for questioning wasn’t the same as being invited to give a speech.

Nathaniel Mackey, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate

[mbembhele]

‘’Black art, like any other, is innovative, demanding and/ or outside to the extent that it addresses the wings and resistances indigenous to its medium qua medium, address ranging from amorous touch to agonistic embrace, angelic rub. To don such wings and engage such resistances as though they were the stuff of identity and community is to have taken a step toward making them so.’’  - Nathaniel Mackey