Nathaniel Mackey’s Long Song

Listening to music with the poet whose alternative history of humankind intersects with the realities of Black life in America.
Nathaniel Mackey
Mackey sees “society as a kind of poem, social ritual as a kind of poem,” he said.Photograph by Kennedi Carter for The New Yorker

When the poet Nathaniel Mackey was young, he would lie in bed and think about where he had gone that day. He was born in Miami in 1947. His father, who had roots in the Bahamas, worked as a butcher. His mother, whose family was from Georgia, raised their four children. They split up when Mackey was about three, and his mother moved with the kids to California, where they eventually settled in Santa Ana. Orange County was still lined with orange groves. “Every night, in bed, I would reflect on the farthest points north, east, south, and west I had gone in the course of that day,” he told me. “It would not be very far. The farthest east I would have gone might be Bristol Street. The farthest south I would have gone would be McFadden Avenue. The farthest north would be First Street.”

Mackey was the youngest child, and the self-described “little egghead” of the family. When he was in his early teens, his brother told him he might like jazz, because it was “serious” music. Mackey found a copy of Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain,” from 1960, whose brooding, fugitive spirit Mackey recognized underneath Davis’s playful trumpet and Gil Evans’s regal arrangements. He heard a “dark knowledge,” a melancholy undercurrent in Davis’s horn passages. It was “speaking to something that was there in me,” he said.

Listening to Davis, Mackey began to notice esoteric systems of knowledge all around him. He bought a book of differential equations at the drugstore, simply because he was fond of math and imagined that these equations would grant him access to “a kind of heaven,” he said. He would stare at the book as if its pages were filled with holy art that he would one day understand.

The more he listened to “Sketches of Spain,” the more he heard. Over time, he imagined that the trumpet was a sorrowful bird. Sometimes, he heard it as the cry of an orphaned boy. Deep within the album’s rhythms lurked hidden dances and rituals, fleeting traces of a suppressed Moorish culture, a secret history tying Spanish flamenco to African-American blues music. “I may not have gone further west than Townsend Street, but I could listen to Miles and go to Spain,” he recalled. “I was seeking out a larger world.”

It’s been decades since Mackey thought about this nightly exercise in mapping. He recounted it last summer, when we were listening to “Sketches of Spain” together over Zoom. I had asked if we could talk about the music that had opened his imagination. In his book- and record-lined den in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a professor of creative writing at Duke, he held up his original copy of the album. “I would listen to the scratches on a Miles Davis record,” he said.

Mackey, who is seventy-three, won the National Book Award, in 2006, for the collection “Splay Anthem,” and he has been awarded Yale University’s Bollingen Prize and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly prize. At the heart of his work are two series of poems he’s been writing and publishing for about forty-seven years. He started one, “Song of the Andoumboulou,” in the mid-seventies, after he heard a recording of funeral chants from the Dogon people of Mali. The poems, of which there are now more than three hundred, explore the Dogon belief in what Mackey calls a “rough draft of a human being, the work-in-progress we continue to be.” “Mu,” a series that he began at roughly the same time, was originally a tribute to the trumpeter Don Cherry but then unfurled into a decades-long trancelike vision of the origins of music and mythology. He is approaching his three hundredth “Mu” poem.

Over the years, these two works have intertwined into what he calls “the long song,” recounting the travels of a band of refugees, a “philosophic posse” exiled somewhere outside of history as we understand it. The destination or substance of their wanderings—the surreal moments when they cross paths with a description of Eric Dolphy’s clarinet, an imaginary tune about Eric Garner, the view from a slaver’s ship, or a nineteen-eighties military campaign—matters less than the sensations and mystical visions they gather along the way. They are constantly starting over, discovering worlds within their worlds. Their journeys don’t tell a story so much as they map a kind of alternative history of humankind. “The world was ever after, / elsewhere. / . . . no / way where we were / was there.”

“It’s almost like he’s writing music in English,” Jeffrey Yang, his longtime editor at New Directions, told me. “It’s a song that includes this parallel universe, as what we’re going through as individuals, as a community, as a country. It’s taking another spin on poetry as being a form of diary writing, but what’s included isn’t just the personal, it’s everything around it.”

This month, New Directions will publish “Double Trio,” the continuation of Mackey’s long song. It consists of three volumes, “Tej Bet,” “So’s Notice,” and “Nerve Church,” each of which is some three hundred pages, twice the length of one of Mackey’s previous poetry books. He refers to the books as double albums and the collection as his boxed set. This spring, Fonograf Editions will release “Fugitive Equation,” an album Mackey recorded with the Creaking Breeze Ensemble. And, in June, the University of Iowa Press will publish “Nathaniel Mackey, Destination Out,” a collection of critical essays reflecting on his career.

Some poets, Mackey explained, get that “sigh of recognition” when they perform. “We try not to have that happen,” he joked, in reference to his style. “Audiences never know when I’m done.”

Yang was an undergraduate when he first heard Mackey read, in the mid-nineties. He told me, “I was, like, What is going on? He was quiet, soft-spoken, and these words were just spilling out.” Mackey often sounds tranquil and digressive when he reads, as though he’s working out a series of anagrams on the fly. “It’s not that kind of release, when you think that someone has said what I always thought,” the poet and critic Fred Moten, who won a MacArthur Fellowship last year, explained. “It’s more like What is that?”

Mackey’s work calls to mind the world-building ambitions of Ezra Pound as well as the experiments in chronicling the Afro-Caribbean diaspora which are at the heart of Wilson Harris’s and Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry. It’s also influenced by what jazz musicians such as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Cecil Taylor did in the sixties and seventies, stretching songs out to a full side of an LP. He describes his career in terms of “ongoingness,” the sense that “you’re never finished.”

“You read it the first time,” Moten said, “and there’s all this richness. Then you go back the thirty-seventh time, and what you discover is not the true meaning. What you discover is that all that’s left to find is way more than you’ll ever have time to find. It’s more than you could ever have imagined. It’s an amazing thing to see the whole thing and a detail of the thing at the same time. He writes the way that Brueghel painted crowd scenes.”

As well as working on the long song, Mackey has been an editor of Hambone, a respected poetry journal, since 1974. (He became the journal’s sole editor and publisher in 1982.) He has also written five epistolary novels as part of a thirty-year-old open-ended prose project titled “From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.” It consists of letters written by N., a jazz musician in nineteen-seventies and eighties Los Angeles, to someone or something called the Angel of Dust, about the progress of a band he has formed.

Mackey has spent the past year at his home, with his wife, Pascale, and two of their children. Except for an occasional doctor’s appointment, he’s been content to wait out the pandemic indoors. Last summer, we began Zooming weekly. I wanted to hear “Sketches of Spain” the way he did, though I quickly realized that this was impossible.

Mackey is five feet eleven inches tall, with the lean frame of a former athlete and shoulder-length dreads flecked with gray. He speaks slowly and carefully, rhythmically cycling through descriptions until he settles on the most precise language he can summon. He made me feel hopelessly inarticulate. Every so often, New Directions would send him a set of proofs of “Double Trio,” and he would giddily point at the enormous pile of paper on his desk. “It’s so unusual to be putting out a thousand pages of poetry in one fell swoop. There are all kinds of negative ways to interpret that,” he said, before bursting out into laughter. “Now I’m asking people to read these three suckers!”

In high school, Mackey was one of the only Black students in his honors classes. He was also a star defensive back for the football team. Élite schools were admitting more Black students, and a group of Princeton alumni invited him for a campus visit, hoping that he might play football, or pole-vault for the school’s track-and-field team. He and another local student, Gene Washington, later a star wide receiver with the San Francisco 49ers, flew out together.

After Mackey told one of his student hosts that he had never seen jazz played live, the student arranged for Mackey to stay with his father in Harlem for a couple of days. The student’s father took him to some jazz clubs, and Mackey saw the wildly inventive saxophonist and flutist Roland Kirk play with his band. “I couldn’t take my eyes off the players,” he recalled. “These gods were there.” It became an easy decision. “An hour-and-fifteen-minute bus ride from this? I was going to Princeton.”

The university introduced him to notions of prestige and status. “I’d never met a Black preppy,” he said. “The Black middle class wasn’t a part of Santa Ana.” Although he was homesick and disliked the snow, the proximity to living, breathing artists opened his eyes to a new path. He ran into Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, at a bookstore in Manhattan and invited him to give a reading at Princeton. Jones politely agreed. When he arrived, he addressed the assembled group of Black students as “Pavlov’s dogs” and spent his visit warning them about the domesticating tendencies of white institutions. Mackey went to a Coltrane gig in New York City and saw the saxophonist sitting at the bar between sets. Mackey introduced himself and asked if he would play “Equinox.” “We’d like to,” Coltrane gently replied, “but we have a piece of music prepared.”

This was in 1965, when Coltrane had begun pursuing a freer, noisier, more liberated style. Mackey was transfixed. There was “a quantum escalation in intensity,” he said, as Coltrane and his group spent the entire night playing the standard “Out of This World,” in a frenzied style that radically deviated from the 1962 recording that Mackey knew by heart. “I thought I knew Coltrane,” he said. “He’s moved on, so I gotta follow him.”

Seeing his idols made the possibility of pursuing a creative life more feasible. “When I was a teen-ager, poets were not alive—they were only in books,” he said. At Princeton, he published some Jones-inspired poetry. But his primary creative outlet was d.j.’ing at the campus radio station, where he became infatuated with searching for segues, resonances, and juxtapositions: “How different can two things be and still have something in common?”

After graduation, he moved back to Southern California and taught algebra at a junior high school. In 1970, he went to graduate school for English at Stanford, where his dissertation dealt with the Black Mountain poets, who believed that poetry should be driven by the human rhythms of breath and utterance.

One day, Mackey was d.j.’ing at KTAO, a free-form community radio station in nearby Los Gatos, when he started browsing a stack of new arrivals. He came across “Les Dogon,” an ethnographic recording originally released in 1958 by the Ocora label. The liner notes described one track as a funeral song to mourn the passing of a tribesman. He listened to “Chant des Andoumboulou” and was captivated.

I have heard “Les Dogon” many times, and I have always found this particular track, which is full of groans and mutters, a somewhat grating experience. I played it over Zoom. Mackey explained what he was hearing: “It’s a bell tolling. What could be more pertinent in a funeral song than time, the fact that one runs out of it.” Soon, a man begins singing—his voice has a dry, croaking quality. “It’s deep, it’s troubled. Raspy. It’s got that rust. It both abrades and sounds like it has been abraded. Attenuated. Under pressure, some kind of strain.” At this point, other voices join in, at a distance, a kind of rote call-and-response. “And then this choral interaction,” Mackey said. “The background voices. They’re higher. It’s almost jubilant, but it can’t really be jubilant while it’s interplaying with that tapping and the raspy voice.” He was grave as he talked about what he was hearing, as though reciting his own incantation.

“And then you get more raspy voices!” he cried out, as the singer was joined by others. He started laughing hysterically. “You thought you were in trouble just listening to that one, and then you find out, you know, he’s got a posse! ” By now he was cracking up. “Oh, my God. That is some strong stuff.”

Mackey said that whenever we returned to pieces like this he could “hear the echo of those repeated listenings.” When he first heard “Chant des Andoumboulou,” he was reading “The Special View of History,” a series of lectures that Charles Olson gave at Black Mountain College, in 1956. Olson wondered what role poetry might play in helping us access the distant past: “What did happen? Two alternatives: make it up; or try to find out. Both are necessary.” Even in antiquity, Olson wrote, poets were cast as unreliable chroniclers of history. Plato had “used the word ‘mouth’ as an insult, to say it lies, and called poets muthologists.”

“This kitchen ain’t big enough fer the both of us.”
Cartoon by Kim Warp

Yet poetry seemed capacious enough for both approaches to history: making it up and plumbing its depths. Returning to “Chant des Andoumboulou” gave Mackey “a sense of society as a kind of poem, social ritual as a kind of poem. So, therefore, the poem as a kind of society, made up of elements like sound, and sense, and the look words have on a page, the look line breaks give to a poem.” He began moving away from poems as discrete pieces of writing—the sealed-off odes that we are taught in school. He thought of how the musicians he loved, like Coltrane or Cecil Taylor, the avant-garde pianist, were always “pulling more and more song” out of an old piece of music. His poetry began scouring histories—the ill-fated Andoumboulou, Sufi mysticism, Gnosticism. In the early seventies, he found a copy of “Mu,” an album by the trumpeter Don Cherry. In Mackey’s mind, the title, and Cherry’s primal, ecstatic music, filled with huffing and puffing, echoed Olson’s fascination with the mouth and “muthologists,” the rhythms of breath that had been central to Black Mountain writing. “If they weren’t talking to each other,” he said, “you know I was going to get them to talk to each other.”

At Stanford, Mackey began dating Gloria Jean Watkins, who later wrote as bell hooks. After finishing his Ph.D., Mackey taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Southern California before taking a job in the literature department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979. During this time, Watkins pursued graduate work and worked on what would become her first book, “Ain’t I a Woman?” They broke up in the mid-eighties. (hooks has alluded to their relationship in her own writing, in which she describes a “quiet and still” lover she met at Stanford.)

Mackey did all the normal things literature professors do—serving on committees, publishing academic monographs in his areas of expertise (experimental poetics, jazz studies), attending conferences, commenting on student work. His academic work brought the Black Mountain Poets into conversation with the Afro-Caribbean writings of Harris and Brathwaite, whose knotty works sought to free long-suppressed histories and languages. In Mackey’s analysis, both sets of writers were trying to reckon with the impossibility of ever representing the past through straightforward language. He also did some unusual things, like hosting “Tanganyika Strut,” a weekly show on KUSP, a community radio station. But he felt unfulfilled by the pace and decorum of academic life. He believed that he had “a finite amount of words” in him, and he wanted to conserve them for his creative work. In 1985, he published his first poetry book, “Eroding Witness.”

While shopping for records in Los Angeles in the late seventies, he had noticed an advertisement for a jazz ensemble called A Love Supreme. He took a seat in an empty theatre, and waited for others to show up. Nobody did. The band came onstage, dressed in costumes and robes. “They were playing for me,” Mackey said. The experience inspired him to begin writing a series of letters imagining what it would be like to play in a band like that. He began using the letters as explorations of the ideas and theories around Black performance that he would once have formulated into academic articles. In 1986, he published “Bedouin Hornbook,” the first in what became his “Broken Bottle” prose series. It was followed by “Djbot Baghostus’s Run,” in 1993, “Atet A.D.,” in 2001, and “Bass Cathedral,” in 2008. Mackey continued to build the world of the long song during this time, publishing the poetry books “School of Udhra,” in 1993, “Whatsaid Serif,” in 1998, “Splay Anthem,” in 2006, and, five years later, “Nod House.”

In 1991, Mackey married Pascale Gaitet, a specialist in French literature at U.C. Santa Cruz. In 2010, they moved with their children, Naima, Gabriella, and Ian, to North Carolina. Gaitet retired from teaching and now works as part of legal-defense teams for people facing the death penalty. The position at Duke allowed Mackey more time to focus on writing. In 2012, he began writing the “Double Trio” poems, and in 2017 he published “Late Arcade,” the fifth book of the “Broken Bottle” series.

Mackey likens his poetic style to the way Coltrane seemed to “exhaust his horn,” testing each note “as if there were infinite possibilities to it.” Over time, the long song enacted this sense of trying again, or exploring paths not taken. Mackey’s work, premised on pulling more song out of the original composition, became influential among Black artists and academics interested in experimental or Afrofuturist approaches to thinking about what one could do with the historical archive, the seemingly settled facts of the historical past. As Mackey wrote, “Where we were, not- / withstanding, wasn’t there . . . / Where we / were was the hold of a ship we were / caught / in. Soaked wood kept us afloat. . . . It / wasn’t limbo we were in albeit we / limbo’d our way there. Where we / were was what we meant by ‘mu.’ ”

“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.’ ”

One of the first things that Mackey does each morning is log on to Facebook. He misses hosting a radio show, and he likes to begin each day by sharing a song or marking a great musician’s birthday. Sometimes he will pose a tongue-in-cheek “research question”: “Ornette Coleman or Coleman Hawkins?” “The audience reaction at 7:07 on Yusef Lateef’s ‘Number 7’ (LIVE AT PEP’S) or the audience reaction at 1:53 on Miles Davis’s ‘Stella by Starlight’ (MY FUNNY VALENTINE: MILES DAVIS IN CONCERT)?” “H.D. or HD?”

In October, he posted a piece by the American composer Conlon Nancarrow, whose style was willfully abstruse and highly technical, and largely devoted to exploring what a player piano could do. “I almost got sad thinking about it,” Mackey said, reflecting on the obscurity that came with Nancarrow’s commitment to a stubborn and highly technical artistic vision. “He’s no sadder than I am. ‘Song of the Andoumboulou . . . 275?’ ” He chuckled to himself. “I might as well be punching holes in piano roller paper.”

When “Splay Anthem” won the National Book Award, he said, he got messages from other experimental poets who felt that “it had won one for our side, finally.” Still, he’s surprised that he has ever received any acclaim for his work. He seemed more excited when he recounted the time that Cecil Taylor told him he loved “Bedouin Hornbook” so much that he gave a copy to Sun Ra.

One week, we listened to Taylor’s music together. I wanted Mackey to help me make sense of Taylor’s chaotic, percussive style on the piano. “A rolling, ringing sound,” Mackey began. “The way he works the bottom registers, a lot of bass down there. Seismic stuff. It just seems so terrestrial. Epic and apocalyptic. A big, epochal sound from Cecil that’s so where we’re at, and have been for a long time, though I think we see it more clearly nowadays. Listening to it again, I heard that more. I heard that I had heard that in the seventies. Beyond those formal questions of dimensionality and the long song, something about the body, the flesh, the fibre of the long song being epic and apocalyptic and epochal. You hear that in Cecil. He’s going for the tale of the tribe. And the tribe is the whole world.

“Listen to Cecil’s music. All that rumbling. You know, that sense of coming up from below, all that thunder. Sounds of wrath. There’s a challenge and a dare, a kind of discontent in what Cecil’s doing. He’s saying, You gotta do better. You gotta listen more closely. You gotta be more focussed. That sound announces that we’re going to a different place.

“At least, that’s what I heard.”

I felt as though I had never actually heard before. We talked about apocalypse, not in the sense of the end of days, but as an uncovering. “That word that has been coming up since George Floyd was killed is relevant, too,” he said. “ ‘Reckoning.’ Apocalypse in terms of reckoning. The revelation of that which has been suppressed.” Although Mackey’s work has always frolicked in the utopian possibilities of creation, the realities of Black life in America often flash through. One of the “Broken Bottle” books closes with a Black academic, wary of approaching cops, imagining what a choke hold must feel like. The academic recalls “having once written that the use of the falsetto in black music, the choked-up ascent into a problematic upper register, had a way, as he’d put it, of ‘alchemizing a legacy of lynchings.’ He’d planned to make use of this idea again,” Mackey writes, “but the prospect of a cop’s arm around his neck reminded him that every concept, no matter how figural or sublime, had its literal, deadletter aspect as well.”

The spectre of mortality haunts “Double Trio.” In 1999, Mackey noticed a cut across his forehead that wouldn’t heal. It turned out to be sarcoidosis, a rare autoimmune disorder. Until then, Mackey had been exceedingly fit and robust. But this started off a litany of health issues. “Speaking of serial form,” Mackey joked. The following year, doctors found sarcoidosis in his lungs, too. In the course of twenty years, he needed a hip replacement and required treatment for cancer in his pelvis, prostate, and lungs. He began reflecting on the “precarity of one’s bodily life. It changes things. I couldn’t take the endlessly ongoing as given.” This realization brought a keener sense of urgency to his writing. In the early twenty-tens, Mackey sought out a state of what he refers to as “all-day music,” training his mind to “always be on call,” should something inspire him to write, and to remain open to any form of inspiration: “I like interruptions. I like the writing to be situated within the realm of my ordinary life.” He was constantly toggling between everyday activities and the world he has been constructing in his head.

I asked him about a line in “Tej Bet,” in which his band of travellers encounters “the abandoned boy grown up, grown / old, worried he’d be leaving soon.” Mackey reminded me of our conversation, months earlier, when we listened to “Sketches of Spain,” and he had heard the cry of an abandoned boy. Now abandonment pointed to something else. As you grow older, he explained, you feel “abandoned by your vigor, your life. The sense of owning your body fades away.” Old muses and lovers appear in his poetry. This was the beginning of a goodbye. In “Nerve Church,” he finds himself in a hospital gown, dreaming of the past: “I kept imagining / mas- / tery, only to find it fell apart. I lay chas- / ing it, dreamt I lay chasing it, never to be / caught short or caught out I promised my- / self, only to find it fell apart.”

“So’s Notice,” the second book of the “Double Trio,” is dedicated to Mackey’s niece Carla and nephew Pee-Wee. “I didn’t expect to outlive them,” he told me. “They both died earlier than they should have. My nephew Pee-Wee because of getting into trouble with the law. That’s not a healthy life. And he got out, and got his life together, but it came back to kill him. He had a heart attack in his early fifties. Similarly, my niece Carla, not because of running into trouble with the law, but, you know, health problems, heart problems. She was still in her fifties. That’s living Black. Our life chances are not as great as white people’s. That’s not by accident. Access to health care, eating the right foods, being subject to the predations of the criminal-justice system. I managed to escape. They did not. There’s a way in which Black people in general—the obvious way in which Black lives don’t matter, as a kind of abandonment, a state of having been abandoned.”

A sense of recursion and repetition runs through Mackey’s career, the idea that song itself is a ritual to be revisited over time. It offers a chance to start again. His poetry is like an archive of all that the world forgot, what might have been had humans resisted the desire to enslave and colonize one another. It’s also an archive of the world as Mackey has taken it in, from concerts and records to poems and lyrical scraps from old anthropology textbooks to the things his niece and nephew once said. And the capaciousness of these works, stretching across decades, is both a tribute to those who blew his mind as a teen-ager and an expression of awe that he survived. “I’m seventy-three,” he said. “Earlier in my life, when people gave out numbers like that, that was like talking about a distant galaxy light-years away. Now I’m there.” The durational project, the long song, is also a celebration of a life that defied the odds. In “So’s Notice,” a line reads, “Cop-show utopia, cop-show ‘blues’ / revue, splat panoply on the tol’you screen.” “Tol’you,” Mackey said, was what Carla and Pee-Wee called the television before they could pronounce the word. The screen was there to tell them things. “That’s me stealing from my abandoned niece and nephew,” he said. “We were watching the news on the ‘tol’you.’ ”

Mackey spent a lot of the past year on Zoom, teaching his classes or giving talks. Many Friday nights, he had drinks with the Surf Club, a loose community of poets and scholars—including Ed Roberson, Joseph Donahue, Fred Moten, Ken Taylor, Brent Hayes Edwards, Pete Moore, and Peter O’Leary—who used to frequent a bar of that name in Durham. They would talk about politics or sports, gossip, and tell stories. At one meeting, Roberson read a new poem that contained some cursing, setting off a conversation about the use of profanity in their work. A few days later, Mackey wove the name Ed into a poem he was working on.

Mostly, Mackey watched the news or sports, often with a notebook on his lap. “I’m always more or less watching that basketball game and more or less writing poetry,” he said. The Black Mountain school promoted an “open field” approach, he explained, which included remaining receptive to poetry wherever it might be, however it might help one gain “leverage” on present-day life. “You know, I hang out and I’m available for the writing to happen. I’m not clamped down to my desk. I get up and go downstairs and make fun of Ian, or play with the dogs, or tease Gabby about the music she’s listening to. It’s all part of the weave.” The description of a wide receiver arching toward a pass might find its way into his work, and nobody would ever recognize it as such. One day, he received a CD in the mail from a harpist named Rhodri Davies. “He plays the horsehair harp. Horsehair harp. That’s going in the poetry.”

He went on, “You build this place. You’re making this place, it takes time to lay it out, stock it, to walk around in it, to get to know it.” The farther he steps into it, he explains, the easier it’s become to find more places within. “Doors open, lead to other doors. It’s a place I like. I guess it’s why I’m staying there.” Since finishing “Double Trio,” Mackey has nearly completed two more books of the long song. He envisages a “double quartet” next.

The night before the Presidential election, Mackey received an e-mail from the poet Susan Howe, checking in and reflecting on “the need in our lives for this thing we do.”

There’s a Jack Spicer line, Howe later told me, that reminded her of Mackey: “Deathward, we ride in the boat.” She felt a deep kinship with Mackey’s commitment to serial work. “I think Nate has that sense of deathwardly riding in the boat. But as we’re riding in that direction we’re part of a whole group of people from the deep past, from the past before print. They’re on the sea. They’re still riding. He continues this ride. I can’t believe he never stopped working.”

On Election Night, Mackey sat in front of the television and worked on “Song of the Andoumboulou 310” in the Notes app of his iPhone. He was getting frustrated with both the writing and the early returns. He went outside to his porch.

“You go out and you look in the sky. We live in this act of creation that is unfathomable and overwhelming. The intricacy, beauty, fearsomeness,” he said. “We push back by becoming active, becoming producers, and putting our little pieces of creativity down next to it. It’s this idea, I can do something, too.

“But every now and then, when the flow’s not coming, you gotta get up from your couch or the desk, you gotta go out on the porch, look up at the sky and enjoy the humility of just taking in this obviously superior and more complex creativity. What we do could never match that. Could I ever write a poem as intricate as a pinecone? Wallace Stevens has got nothin’ on this.” ♦