If you’re headed to the ASAP/1 conference, I’ll be presenting on Friday at 8am.
Friday, Oct. 23, 8:00-9:30 a.m. SALON B
“Ethics and Affect in the Contemporary Arts”
Moderator: TBA
· “Dreaming of Djeannine: Nathaniel Mackey’s Jazz Derivations”
John Patrick Craig, University of Tennessee Knoxville
· “Morrison’s Beloved, Nancian Community, Derridean Witnessing”
Ana Maria Luszczynska, Florida International University
· “Collective Intimacy: Troubling Spencer Tunick's Relational Aesthetic”
Alana Gerecke, Simon Fraser University
My abstract:
Dreaming of Djeannine: Nathaniel Mackey’s Jazz Derivations
This presentation considers the jazz communication depicted in Nathaniel Mackey’s novel Djbot Baghostus’s Run as a product of poet Robert Duncan’s notion of derivation. It starts with Mackey’s speech at the Poetry for the Next Society conference in which he declares that the poet must be “against” rather than “for” the next society and compares his arguments there with the contention between Duncan and Levertov over the proper poetic response to the Vietnam War. I argue that when Mackey in his “Gassire’s Lute” approaches Duncan’s notion of the daemonic as a real outside influence, he is properly understanding Duncan to be applying a formal poetic principle to ethical relations. He understands Duncan’s poetics of derivation to be a model for communication and engagement with the other. I argue that, for Mackey, Duncan’s notions of permission and complicity replace agonistic and hubristic understandings of artistic influence and creation with a vision of artistic derivation and mutual dependency.
I then apply this reading to the conflict between the male and female members of the jazz ensemble depicted in Djbot Baghostus’s Run when the band has to choose a new drummer. The question of whether the new drummer will be male, maintaining a gender imbalance in the band’s make-up, or female, establishing gender parity in the band, is resolved through sound and the interpretation of sound, the music of poetry and language. Both amity and mutual dependency are evoked in the novel by a contrast in the two choices. In the end, the phallic and Ezra Pound-like drummer SunStick, who maintains he “plays the Truth” as opposed to time, is passed-over in favor of a woman who exists at that time only as a dream. In the men’s and women’s dreams, her name passes through several permutations on Djeannine, the name of the woman drummer eventually found. This ghostly dream-apparition, I argue, is a continuation of Duncan’s notion of the daemonic as an outside influence, as a form of derivation, that Mackey finds so appealing. And I conclude that such apparitions in Mackey’s novels and poetry are realized, as in the example of Djeannine and as in Duncan’s poetry, through the music of poetry.
