Prose Confusion too!

What I found most intriguing about Nathaniel Mackey was his diversity in form. We read prose, poetry and an interview by him, and nearly all of them were equally baffling to me. Like last class, sometimes I found that if I read his poems faster I could make some sense of them, but as a whole I was left wondering about many of the poems. In particular, I cannot say that I as really able to make sense of the visual poems with odd indentations. I tried reading just the right justified words to see if it worked together, or also using the single word as a cue for the rest of the stanza, but still hound no definitive answer. Which left me wondering, what do these visual cues mean? What such discourse in presentation? What is he saying by the way he arranges the poem, not the words within it?

One of the most interesting things for me though was the interview. I thought that Mackey tied together and essentially summarized so many of the discussions and questions we had semester. He discussed the how poems can be both oral and visual simultaneously, how religion and music are often one and the same, how the audience can matter but also be irrelevant, and seemed to express consistent “integration” ideas as Harryette Mullen.