Sounding Out: Nathaniel Mackey's Ontological Archive in Fugitive Run

Abstract

In the early seventies Nathaniel Mackey was a doctoral student at Stanford University working on his dissertation Call Me Tantra: Open Field Poetics as Muse, his poetics developing temporally and geographically within the San Francisco Bay Area during the emergence of Language writing and New Narrative. Mackey has described his relationship to the Bay thusly: “It was in the larger Bay Area that my earliest bondings with people on the basis of being an aspiring writer took any significant form. [. . .] It was really my trips to San Francisco and the East Bay that were most formative” (qtd. in Rosenthal 164), introducing Mackey not only to numerous writers but also to musicians such as Cecil Taylor. Language Writer Ron Silliman included Mackey in his selection of eight experimental poets in the Socialist Review in 1988, a group Silliman introduced by asserting that these writers have distinct audiences and readers while also suggesting that, for some, their relationship to literary experimentation, particularly vis-à-vis formal innovations and the construction or deconstruction of the subject, is “more conventional.” Silliman did this by setting up a dichotomy between the “subjects of history” who are largely white, heterosexual males