&Now 2019 Conference

The four-decade-spanning work of poet, novelist and scholar Nathaniel Mackey, one of &Now’s featured speakers this year, instantiates an exemplary Point of Convergence –though calling it a “point” might be too precise a trope for a body of work that revels in restless slippage, self-adjacency, asymptotic reach that acknowledges absence and loss, divergence, pervergence and multivergence as constitutive of convergence. In Mackey’s work convergence as synesthesia brings together the sonic and linear vibrations of speech and music as well as the visual properties of syntactic writing and asemic, naturally occurring forms of inscription. As well, historic and cosmological planes converge in a complex durée that situates his fiction, poetry, and critical scholarship in multiple temporal scales. Moreover, the syncretism so characteristic of diasporic cultural expression finds a kind of apotheosis in his virtuosic literary achievement.

In a roundtable (itself a convergence of minds) intended to give potential and extant readers a range of entry-points into Mackey’s work, three poet/scholars (Erica Hunt, Joseph Donahue, Jeanne Heuving), and two poetry scholars (Maria Damon and Adalaide Morris), all of whom have written on Mackey’s work, will discuss their own relationships to and entries into Mackey’s work, possibly speaking from a forthcoming book of essays on his work to which a number of us have contributed, and then include the audience in trying to expand even further the ways in which Mackey’s work can be approached, if never entirely grasped (an asymptotic relationship to it feels consistent with his ethic and aesthetic, and also with the readerly humility necessary to venture into his verbal thicket).