School of Udhra

Nathaniel Mackey.

Song of the Andoumboulou: 9
gorgeous language, really sensual:

...pools our
palms cupped. Our palms keep,
their muddled waters near
the root of the world-axis
tug
our boat's, our bed of sweat's
blown seeds...

The body floats. The oldtime people sing,
say hurt is light angels eat,
come whispering meekly by the
banks...


what he's doing wih line break:

Baited lip. Love's lawless
jaw. Said, "I love you," loaded
like
a pointed gun.


song:11
allergic to time because we react to it?

song:12
remembering--these are songs, have the rhythms of songs though the rhythms (punctuated by internal rhyme) are interrupted occasionally--

...light, slack hoped-for rope
groped at, unraveled.

progressions, similar to those in Inanna song: 14

Nodded out, all
hell broke loose, blind earth, blue heaven.
Burst of adrenaline. Dreamt I was dreaming, drugged,
boated
back and forth between ruts.

I think Mackey can pull off some of these tricks (repetitions and building progressions) from older texts (like Inanna) because of his line breaks-- even in the direct repetitions, the phrases/verses are lineated differently (but not so as to seem to beat the phrase senseless, drawing out every possible variation)

privileging of space: playing on readers' expectations: are blown

away

--forces reader to make semantic sense vertically as well as horizontally, left and right and right and left. Though they never stray outside a thin strip running down the page (not all over the page) and therefore seem to still resemble songs

Warmed-over gospel. Stick-figure truth. (p19)

Some patterns/repetitions/themes:

light, blue, legs (world beginning only as slender feet, slim legs wrapped around man, Legba) "wouldn't say what" (refrain) and

pronoun use: "Irritable Mystic"

His they their
we, their he
his was but if
need be one,
self-
extinguishing
I, neither sham nor
excuse yet an
alibi, exited,
out,
else
the only where
he'd be.

(67) Book of he, book of she,
book of him, book of her,
Them
to the what-sayer's Who is
this "they"?, this their coded way
of continuing, that she came
back...

and (81)

covered
we were and by that touched "I-ness" to "I-ness,"
inward, wombed inducement
arced into "us-ness,"
otherness, nothingness...


these segments display Mackey's constant separating, grouping, scrambling, regrouping of the self/selves-- seems to be related to the idea of twinlessness-- here both peerlessness and incompleteness; wholeness of individual and half-ness; diverse, fragmented, yet collected/ive. (100 visions and revisions of these origins):

(79)
...No him, no you
no
her, no them. Nipped,
non-pronomial...

I and I and I
ad infinitum

86)
Ominous music made a mumblers
academy,
vatic scat, to be alive
was to be warned it said...