Yet another Mackey trope follows soon after. It’s a sophisticated version of repetition, insistence Gertrude Stein would call it. Seeing the two “takes” in this chapbook side by side makes the trope easy to notice and Mackey elaborated on previous uses of it in our August 2012 interview:
…certainly the idea of first, second, third, fourth takes applies, but again it’s back to what I said earlier, which is that it gives a sense or it accepts a sense of provisionality, that what you see on page sixty-two was not final, nor is what you see on page sixty-four final. These are two versions that are of something. There is so much that is the same in them that you can see that they are versions of some same thing. The idea that they could be varied, maybe endlessly I think, is there, but it also should shed a certain light or a certain way of looking on the rest of the work, the surrounding work that isn’t repeated in as obvious a form as that. That work too is not definitive in some kind of final way. It too is subject to further takes. In some ways, that’s what serial work is, take after take after take. I had a certain resistance to actually making that quality that obvious, but I did it. I had done it in Splay Anthem and I did it again. I guess what one wouldtypically do would be to take the second version as a revision of the first and give it a certain authority and a certain finality, so that you could get rid of the first, as if to say, “This is it.” But I didn’t necessarily feel that way about the second version. I mean, it was a version. It wasn’t the “it” that was being striven for in some kind of ultimate way that would exclude all other possible versions. At the same time, I did find that I had a bit of resistance within myself to doing that, but I did do it. It’s kind of scary, because one could probably do that with every page. [Laughter]
In the instance used in this chapbook, there are nearly three stanzas repeated word-for-word leading to the alternate version, the second stab at it. Mackey’s attraction to the serial poem and this trope are coming from a similar source, discussed in that same interview. The lack of finality, the negative capability, the practice of taking a stab at getting the articulation of a sense or feeling right permeates this work and Mackey’s work in general. As is the serial poem itself, this is – if not in opposition to the practice of the well-oiled (tight) one page anthology poem – is beyond it. How work written from this way is myriad-minded, opposed to closure, or open to the process of, well, being open, is part of its appeal and likely part of what makes someone looking for the occasional poem, the well-wrought poem, crazy. Devoid of “irritable reaching.”
“No- / tice how it fades,” one would say. / “Tell it faint.” “Notice how it stays,” / one heard one’s echo jest… Is how Mackey puts it soon after the second restating of the Italy/dream scene, hinting at his process. Soon after there’s another echo of his work, the lineage into which he places himself. Like the musical references which give us the sense Mackey is after, a world poem in the vein of world music, there’s the allusion to Louis Zukovsky when Mackey writes, There they were where how-you-sound / met what-you-say, lower limit song / upper limit scream, voice extenuated / wafer- / thin…
The combination of song and content is at the core of the appeal of Mackey’s poetry, his writing in general. The music may pull you in, but the depth of the content is what lingers. You’re being called on some level to be fully human, to extinguish the bad habits, the limitations. Of course not all are called to this pursuit. Some are destined to live life after painful life in samsara, but the seekers among us, if given the time required, will find this quest compelling and perhaps more than an echo of their own quest. I would write “dying to find out how it ends” but you’d know better. Still, somehow, that applies in a weird kind of way.
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