ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a global vision of one strain of Mackey's poetry, attempting to elucidate how musical forms have influenced the poet's work on the page, how he has maintained access to difference even within a bounded form through the inspiration of music both ancient and modern. While lyric poetry is often thought to have originated with nineteenth-century Romanticism, the roots of lyric go back much farther than the nineteenth century, and a pre-Romantic notion of lyric is relevant for a consideration of Nathaniel Mackey's poetry. "Othering" is Mackey's term for "black linguistic and musical practices that accent variance, variability what reggae musicians call versioning". As in Baraka's analysis of the movement from swing music to bebop, Mackey's use of a similar formulation is likewise aimed against stasis, the freezing of music, poetry, or other arts into a profitable or satisfactory, but ultimately empty form.
