Nathaniel Mackey's work displays a deep and idiosyncratic erudition that encompasses many cultures and traditions, but his poetry remains true to an ideal of spontaneous, joyous musicality ultimately derived from improvisational jazz. Mackey has written eloquently about jazz, and he has been remarkably successful in incorporating the excitement of that music into his poetry and prose. His work proposes a truly multicultural aesthetic, in which the innovations of postbop jazz pioneers are recognized along with the experiments of the major avant-garde American poets. Among Mackey's aims are to recapture in poetry the contemporary individual's search for origins and identity among the multifarious cultural traces making up a world of simultaneity and to recapture the moments of spiritual breakthrough, the surrender of self, the access to the numinous that is afforded within the spaces of music, religion, and poetry.

Mackey was born on 25 October 1947 in Miami, Florida. His mother...