Complicating the Distinction: An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey

Connor Southard took part in an interview with Nathaniel Mackey for the Duke Chronicle.

The interview focuses on the roles of being a teacher and a poet before turning to Mackey's work:

Your work is often described as being “mystical,” which seems to imply a separation from the concrete stuff going on around you, from the mundane. But to what extent do you see yourself responding directly to the events around you?

We’re all having experiences of the public—news, things that reach a mega-audience, entertainment, popular culture, politics. We all live in that world. That world has a lot of tools with which to convince us that it is the world, and maybe the only world. But I think that we’re all aware of the limitations to that. We’re having experiences, we’re having apprehensions, we’re seeing things that don’t quite square with that public discourse. One of the things that arts have generally functioned to do is to give a person, whether artist or reader, something that gets more into the graininess and the particularity of lived experience that is not so generic as public discourse and the public representations of experience. The distinction between public and private, mundane and mystical—that distinction is largely maintained by public discourse. One of the things that makes art matter is the fact that it complicates that distinction.

The mundane is in my work, however mystical readers may see it to be. I see art as an act of transposition—a musical analogy. You get a piece of music in one key, and you transpose it to another. I think that art transposes the mundane, but it doesn’t abandon the mundane. Art loses one of the sources of its vitality if it doesn’t stay in touch with the world.

Read it all after the jump.