Luke Harley

Words that bleed music

Postbop jazz in the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey

Luke Harley
Left: Nathaniel Mackey at Vision Festival, New York, 2015, courtesy of Nathaniel Mackey. Right: Amiri Baraka at the Malcolm X Festival, San Antonio Park, Oakland, California, May 2007. Photo by David Sasaki via Wikimedia Commons.

In his preface to Blue Fasa (2015), Nathaniel Mackey reflects on what is arguably the key preoccupation in his oeuvre: the relationship between music and language. Mackey’s comments emerge out of a sense of disquiet with the way the two modes of communication are often presumed remote from the other by today’s artists and scholars.

January 16, 2018

Poetry as virtual community

A review of 'The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography'

Luke Harley

Maude Fife Room, UC–Berkeley, November 18, 2011. As eight of the ten “pianists” — Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Kit Robinson, and Barrett Watten — worked their way through a performance and Q&A session of The Grand Piano, a few things quickly became discernible.[1]

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