NATHANIEL MACKEY finds himself drawn to dissonance. Where others hear only discord, he senses the prospect of discovery. Even in the morass of post-9/11 America—where everything changed except the things that needed to—he finds ways to create something beautiful amid what he calls the "imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become."

After a quarter-century of simultaneous perseverance in three often frustrating professions—poet, professor and radio host—Mackey's cultural stock rose overnight with the announcement that his latest collection, Splay Anthem, is the winner of this year's National Book Award for poetry. Mackey, who lives in Santa Cruz, says he was as surprised as anyone by the decision: "That award usually doesn't go to poets writing in a more experimental vein."

Indeed, Mackey may be the least conventional poet to win the National Book Award since William Carlos Williams took home the first back in 1950 for Paterson, which was put out by the upstart imprint, New Directions, which would go on to publish Splay Anthem more than a half-century later.

"It gave the award an added resonance, because William Carlos Willams is one of the first modern poets that I read when I was a teenager back in the '60s," says Mackey of the seminal poet, who also drew upon the rhythms of American jazz in his search for the perfect line. "I call him my initiator into modern poetry, because up until that point, I'd read stuff like Longfellow. ... And he's remained a real presence for me; I teach a senior seminar up at UC-Santa Cruz devoted entirely to Williams and his work."

Mackey and his initiator also had similar views when it comes to dissonance. "Williams has a couple of lines in book four of Paterson where he says, 'Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery,'" recalls Mackey.

Indeed, whether the dissonance in question comes from a Pharoah Sanders or Ornette Coleman solo—or from the events and aftermath of 9/11 that surrounded and informed the "Nub" (Mackey's metaphor for America in spiritual decline, it's also the name of the book's final section) part of Splay Anthem—Mackey sees it as a source of opportunity that can either be embraced or ignored.

"It's like finding what the opening is, and what the possibility that dissonance discloses is," he explains. "So there is a kind of beauty that can come out of that. There is even a kind of positive prospect. You know, you learn, you move on, you incorporate what was the disturbing experience."

He continues, "the shock of the new is often a dissonant experience, and a dissonant experience can also lead us to recognizing the necessity of the new. Because we don't have the old comforts."

The old illusions, on the other hand, may be even harder to forego. As Mackey writes in his introduction to Splay Anthem, "In a match that seems to have been made in hell, hijacked airliners echo and further entrench a hijacked election ..."

"When 9/11 happened I was into the second section of the book, 'Fray,'" says Mackey of Splay Anthem, which also includes the latest installments in Mackey two decades-long serial poems, Mu and Song of Andoumboulou.

"And it seemed like what I had already been writing about now had this very huge and momentous resonance with what happened with 9/11 and its aftermath. So that's why the whole business of Nub came to be what it was. These are kinds of things that I've been thinking about and working with over a period of time: This sense of catastrophe, disaster, failed connection, failed collectivity, you know, miscarriage of one sort or another. So Nub just flowed right out of that."

This Is His Music

Nate Mackey grew up as the youngest of three brothers in Southern California. While still in junior high school, he began a musical awakening that would parallel the expansion of his poetic boundaries.

"The younger of my two brothers—who's eight years older than me—he had some Miles Davis and some Duke Ellington albums," recalls Mackey. Intrigued by the controversies surrounding Ornette Coleman he was reading about in Downbeat, Mackey went out and bought Coleman's This Is Our Music album. "That was the first time I heard [Coleman's trumpeter] Don Cherry, and Ornette Coleman as well, and it was a jarring dissonant experience," laughs Mackey.

It was Don Cherry's early-'70s albums with percussionist Ed Blackwell, Mu First Part and Mu Second Part, that provided Mackey with the title for his serial poem, Mu, which continues in Splay Anthem. "Don Cherry's movement toward cross-culturality was really a formative experience for me," explains Mackey. "He got into all these other world musics, you know Tibetan stuff. ... The first place I ever heard Balinese gamelan music and instruments was on Don Cherry's Eternal River album.

"Part of the impetus to widen my own horizons came from these musicians," Mackey continues. "I was reading about John Coltrane listening to Ravi Shankar's music, him and Eric Dolphy sitting around listening to Pygmy music from Central Africa and things like that."

It was also in Southern California that Mackey was introduced to R&B via future Pacifica Radio host Johnny Otis. "He had a TV program, The Johnny Otis Show, on one of the local stations back around 1957-58," recalls Mackey. "Esther Philips was a regular; she was part of the Johnny Otis Revue—she was called Little Esther then. There were these three rather large women singers, I've forgotten their names, but they were called the Three Tons of Joy. It was like a variety show. Redd Foxx appeared, I mean, a very sanitized Redd Foxx would come on and do comedy. But it was fun."

Many decade later, Mackey was in a used bookstore in Santa Cruz when he came upon a copy of Colors and Chords, a book of Otis' artwork, which included the "Horn Player" image that would end up becoming the cover of Splay Anthem.

When Mackey arrived at Princeton as an English undergraduate in the '60s, the curriculum turned out to be even less integrated than the university itself. "There was only one African American author read in the entire Princeton English department curriculum, and that was Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which was read in an introduction to American literature course," he recalls. Mackey and other students successfully pushed for a course in African American literature, and it was in that class that he first met newly published poet Ishmael Reed.

Back on the West Coast, as a graduate student at Stanford, Mackey began editing a literary journal called Hambone; he recalls how one favorite issue contained material by Ishmael Reed, musician Sun Ra and poet Robert Duncan. In the late '70s, Mackey ended up taking a post at UC-Santa Cruz, where he's been a professor of literature since 1979.

That same year, Mackey—who had broadcast jazz at Princeton's WPRB and world music at Stanford's KTAO—began his extended run as a DJ at KUSP (88.9 FM), a noncommercial station in Santa Cruz. "I was doing a musical-mix program that included jazz, but I was also playing 'Song of the Andoumboulou' by the Dogon of Mali and that kind of stuff." Mackey's current show, Tanganyika Strut, airs Sundays at 3pm and includes "African music, Middle Eastern and North African, Pakistan and Indian, Indonesian; on the European side, flamenco is a big place on my map, but also Portuguese fado, West Indian, some reggae and calypso, South American, Brazil, Susan Baca, Peruvian, different things."

He also continues to edit Hambone, which he likens to putting a radio show together. "You segue, you juxtapose, you mix." But when it comes to the journal, Mackey has foregone keeping to a regular publishing schedule. "I just brought out one in September; I think it's up to No. 18," he says. "It's coming out every other year now. It got to the point where I had to either not do it, or I had to do it on this infrequent schedule. I gave myself permission to bring it out when I can."

Indeed, Mackey is nothing if not busy. He's already finished writing Bass Cathedral, the fourth book in a prose series of epistolary novels that recount the adventures of a fictional L.A. music collective called the Mystic Horns.

While his prose may be more accessible, virtually all of Mackey's work conveys a rich musicality—especially when read aloud—in form as well as content. "Oh yeah, that's one of the defining characteristics of poetry, for me, is its musicality," says Mackey. "You know, I try to cultivate the music of language, which is not just sounds. It's also meaning and implication. It's also nuance. It's also a kind of angular suggestion, that kind of stuff. ... You know, I'm not a sound poet in that sense where meaning doesn't count, where sound is so predominant that meaning fades from the picture. But certainly music is not only a reference point for me, but something that informs how I approach writing."

Having created a self-sustaining body of work that encompasses poetry, music and politics, Mackey is too grounded to let a National Book Award—however much he may enjoy the attention—distract him from his literary mission.

In addition to the forthcoming Bass Cathedral, he reports, "I'm at the halfway point, at least, in a new book of poems. And I'm still writing in those two series, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu. I don't see them as closed; they're open series. I imagine I will be writing them as long as I'm writing."

Splay Anthem, by Nathaniel Mackey; New Directions; 112 pages; $15.95 paper

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