Jackson Mac Low

Thought I'd post a couple of articles on Jackson Mac Low, who passed away
recently at age 82. His concern with the algorithmic goes back to the early
sixties.

Would also recommend (more than the journalism, really)

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/maclow/dlb.html
Bruce Campbell, University of California, Riverside

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/maclow
lots of links from here

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/maclow/piombino.html
a 1997 post to the Poetics list


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By Mark Swed
Los Angeles Times

Jackson Mac Low, 82, a prolific poet who questioned the nature of poetry
and become a pioneer in liberating language from logic and lifting it
into the realm of sound and performance, died Wednesday at Cabrini
Hospital in New York City. He had suffered a stroke last month.

A typical first response to encountering Mac Low in print or at the
podium was one of mystification. Words and nonsense syllables
unconnected by syntax might splay across the page every which way. He
could write sentences that ran on for pages. Modest, shy, seemingly
uncertain, he performed his poems as if they were inexplicable music,
the weird intoning and droning of utterances coming from somewhere deep
and strange inside him.

Inspired by composer John Cage, with whom he studied in the 1950s, Mac
Low used chance operations in making his art. Influenced also by
Buddhist practice, he attempted to free his ego from his words, to take
away his intentions from his art. Yet in defying the expected nature of
poetry, Mac Low could be a peculiarly mesmerizing figure.

"He really went his own way," Marjorie Perloff, an author of several
books on progressive poetics, said Thursday. "But he was one of the few
people who could combine music and word, and he was a true forerunner in
the areas of conceptual art, sound poetry and performance art."

From the very start, Mac Low challenged convention. Born in Chicago in
1922, he was educated at the University of Chicago and Brooklyn College.
His first interest was music, but by 1938, he was already writing poems
with lines such as "Gay cake gotta gay cake go gotta gay cake," and
later he sometimes described himself as a "composer of poetry."

Besides poetry and music, Mac Low was actively interested in theater and
had a close association with the experimental Living Theatre in New York
City during the 1950s and '60s. And in doing so, he didn't so much break
genres as ignore them altogether. Hence, he could provide music for a
Living Theatre staging of W.H. Auden's poem "The Age of Anxiety" or
write his own play, "The Marrying Maiden," meant as text for Cage's
music.

His interest in theater, performance, music and Cage - as well as his
involvement with anarchist thought - also made him a key figure in
Fluxus, the neo-Dada art movement of the early '60s. It was then that
Mac Low came into his own as a performer of his works.

Although he published 27 books, it is as a performer that Mac Low may
best be remembered. However abstract the processes he tirelessly
invented to produce his work, however artificial the poetry might look
as printed text, it always came to life when he read.

A tireless advocate of sound poetry, Mac Low held teaching posts at
Mannes School of Music (1966) and New York University (1966-73) and
lectured widely. Among his many honors was the $100,000 Wallace Stevens
Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1999.

Mac Low is survived by his second wife, the poet Anne Tardos; and two
children, Mordecai-Mark Mac Low and Clarinda Mac Low, from a previous
marriage to painter Iris Lezak.

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Jackson Mac Low, 82, Poet and Composer, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX

Published: December 10, 2004
New York Times

ackson Mac Low, a poet, composer and performance artist whose work reveled
in what happens when the process of composition is left to carefully
calibrated chance, died on Wednesday at Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan.
He was 82 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications of a stroke that he had last month, according to
the Academy of American Poets, which announced his death.

The author of more than two dozen books of poetry, as well as musical
compositions, plays and multimedia performance works, Mr. Mac Low was a
seminal figure in the American experimentalist movement of the 1950's and
after. A founding member of the avant-garde group Fluxus, he collaborated
frequently with the composer John Cage. In recent years Mr. Mac Low often
worked with his wife, Anne Tardos, a poet, artist and composer.

What united Mr. Mac Low's output was a fascination with randomness and with
the limitless combinatorial possibilities of language.

"The sense of words as being primarily in a circumstance that's limiting -
sentencing them to sentences - he did not take kindly to that," the poet
Robert Creeley said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Mr. Mac Low's poems, like his musical compositions, did not so much blur the
boundary between language and music as render it invisible. He prized words
not simply for their meaning (he worked as an etymologist as a young man)
but as movable fragments of pure sound.

Sprung from their sentences, shuffled and reassembled, Mr. Mac Low's words
became layered acoustic collages, meant to be performed aloud. Constantly
shifting, always evolving, rarely the same twice, his poems laid bare the
machinery of poetry-making itself.

In Mr. Mac Low's work, structure depended on chance. He composed some poems
by shuffling index cards containing words and phrases. For others he used
random-number tables and, in later years, computer programs.

Some sprang from a roll of the dice. "7.1.11.1.11.9.3!11.6.7!4.,a biblical
poem" was the first in a cycle, begun in the mid-1950's, that was rooted in
the Hebrew Bible. The poem comprises not only words (spoken aloud by one or
more performers) but also rhythmic silences (represented by "/__ /").

Mr. Mac Low prefaced the poem with two pages of instructions describing the
various possibilities for reading it. (The title represents the number of
words and silences in each line, which he determined with dice.) When read
aloud by multiple performers, each going at a different pace, the poem
evokes the wash of murmuring of Orthodox Jews at prayer.

Jackson Mac Low was born in Chicago on Sept. 12, 1922. After receiving an
associate's degree from the University of Chicago in 1941, he earned a
bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College in 1958. He was awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1985 and in 1999 received the Wallace Stevens Award, which
carries a $100,000 prize, from the Academy of American Poets.

Mr. Mac Low's first marriage, to Iris Lezak, ended in divorce in 1973.
Besides Ms. Tardos, whom he married in 1990, he is survived by two children
from his first marriage, Mordecai-Mark and Clarinda, both of Manhattan, and
one grandchild.

His other work includes "Two Plays: The Marrying Maiden and Verdurous
Sanguinaria" (1999), "Pieces o' Six: Thirty-three Poems in Prose" (1992) and
the CD "Open Secrets" (1993).

In a 1999 lecture, Mr. Mac Low described what he called his "ways of
working."

"They are almost always ways in which I engage with contingency, and in
doing so I am often, to a large extent, 'not in charge' of what happens
while I do so," he explained. "They often surprise me, and they almost
always give me pleasure and seem to give pleasure to others."