Hambone's Call: Nathaniel Mackey and Editorial Poetics

Abstract

This essay examines Nathaniel Mackey’s editorship of the literary journal Hambone. Placing Mackey’s editorship in conversation with his theory of ‘discrepant engagement’, which he describes as a stylised practice that seeks to open ‘presumably closed orders of identity and signification’, I argue that Mackey develops an editorial poetics that opens American literary culture to a deep history of African American and cross-cultural creative expression and improvisation. The history of such improvisation – often taken up in the face dispossession – transforms Mackey’s editorial poetics into a sustained reflection on concepts of labour and hospitality at work in everyday creative practices.