Jackson Mac Low (USA)
1922-2004
Poet, composer, essayist, performance artist, playwright and painter, Jackson
Mac Low was born in Chicago in 1922. His poetry began to be published in 1941.
Since 1954 he has often employed chance operations and other nonintentional, as
well as intentional techniques, when composing verbal, musical, theatrical, and
multimedia performance works. Mac Low’s turn to nonintentional methods was
inspired by Zen Buddhism (as taught by Dr. D. T. Suzuki), the I Ching, and John
Cage and his music composed in the early 1950s by chance operations, some of
which is indeterminate in its performance.
By
the middle 1960s, Mac Low was well known for his readings, performances, and
theater works. The Marrying Maiden, a play chance-operationally
derived (1958-59) from the I Ching, was performed by The Living Theater in New
York in 1960-1961; it was directed by Judith Malina, with décor by Julian Beck
and music by John Cage. Mac Low’s Verdurous Sanguinaria (written
in 1961 and published in 1967) premiered in 1961, produced by the composer La
Monte Young in Yoko Ono’s New York loft. His Twin Plays was
performed in 1963. Selections from The Pronouns, forty poems that
are instructions for dancers, was written in 1964 and performed in 1965 by
Meredith Monk and a group she organized.
.png)
In
1963, with the editor La Monte Young, Mac Low co-published the first edition of
An Anthology, which through George Maciunas gave rise to Fluxus, of which Mac
Low was the first literary editor. Mac Low published several books of poetry
throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, including August Light Poems (1967), 22
Light Poems (1968), Stanzas for Iris Lezak (1972), 4
trains (1974), 21 Matched Asymmetries (1978),
and Asymmetries 1-260 (1980).
The
1980s saw Mac Low working more often in intentional poetic forms, influenced,
in part, by the “Language” poets, some of whom themselves claimed Mac Low’s
poetry as an influence. Among the major works of this period are From
Pearl Harbor Day to FDR’s Birthday (1982) and Bloomsday (1984).
A large selection of his work also appeared in Representative Works: 1938-1985
(1986). Over the past decades Mac Low continued to publish important works
including Twenties (1991), Pieces o’ Six (1992),
and 42 Merzgedichte in Memorium Kurt Schwitters, which won the 1994
America Award for the best new book of American poetry. In 1999 Mac Low was
awarded the Tanning Prize for Poetry.
Mac
Low died in New York in 2004.
BOOKS OF POETRY
The Pronouns—A Collection of 40 Dances—for the Dancers (New York:
Mac Low and Judson Dance Workshop, 1964); August Light Poems (New
York: Caterpillar Books, 1967); 22 Light Poems (Los Angeles:
Black Sparrow Books, 1968); Stanzas for Iris Lezak (Barton,
Vermont: Something Else Press, 1972); 4 trains (Providence,
Rhode Island: Burning Deck, 1974); 36th Light Poem: In Memoriam Buster
Keaton (London: Permanent Press, 1975); 21 Matched Asymmetries (London:
Aloes Books, 1978); phone (New York and Amsterdam: Printed
Editions and Kontexts, 1979); Asymmetries 1-260 (New York:
Printed Editions, 1980); “Is that Wool Hat My Hat?” (Milwaukee,:
Membrane Press, 1982); From Pearl Harbor Day to FDR’s Birthday (Los
Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1982); Bloomsday (Barrytown,
New York: Station Hill, 1984); French Sonnets (Tucson, Arizona:
Black Mesa, 1984); The Virginia Woolf Poems (Providence, Rhode
Island: Burning Deck, 1985); Representative Works: 1938-1985 (New
York: Roof Books, 1986); Words nd Ends from Ez (Bolinas,
California: Avenue B, 1989); Twenties: 100 Poems (New York:
Roof Books, 1991); Pieces o’ Six (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon
Press, 1992); 42 Merzgedichte in Memorium Kurt Schwitters (Barrytown,
New York: Station Hill, 1994); Barnesbook (Los Angeles: Sun
& Moon Press, 1996); 125 Postcard Poems (Ellsworth, Maine:
Backwoods Broadsides, 1996); Stein Series (1998-2003); 20 Forties
(1999); Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 1995-2002 (New York: Granary
Books, 2005); Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Poems, ed. by Anne
Tardos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); 154 Forties
(Counterpath, 2012);
For the Jackson MacLow site, go here: https://www.jacksonmaclow.com/
╬Winner of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English
2005-2006
Feeling Down, Clementi Felt Imposed upon from Every Direction.
( HSCH 10 )
“Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.”
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.,
“The Problem of the Gourmet Planet,”
Analog, November 2003
Feeling down, Clementi armored herself against unwanted compliments.
The effects of painful desperation were imposing their influence, she felt, on
every democracy.
She always felt worst for a crowd rightly punished for wrong reasons.
Could frugal Clementi have been beaming dispositive influences directly at
others?
Had she, without a thought, imposed a negative influence on everyone near her?
Possibly, she supposed, someone of limited understanding had mistaken an ironic
remark for a revelation.
Desperately, she noted, freedom competed with itself and murmured at
opportunities imposed on it.
The dire effects of forced dependence were being repulsed by the desperate.
Indelicate competition in the midst of imposed democracy was imposing
desperation.
Imposed democracy was imposing desperation.
Early on she’d recognized a great many sorts of pretended feeling.
Clementi had shamelessly declared compunction at the slaughter of fishes.
She wrongly supposed that no dependent would notice her myriad contradictions.
Wouldn’t that have influenced her freedom’s recognition?
She herself murmured at every opportunity imposed on her.
The tyranny of desperation was the crowning affectation imposed on her.
With delicate compliments she declared her objection to that desperation.
Was that when she declared imposed democracy a punishment?
She felt it a punishment greater than being found out
Clementi found that she’d been disposing noxious beams in all directions.
They directly revealed her own dependence and what she depended on!
How could she reply to what she revealed to herself?
All were insisting they were desperate for freedom.
But what seemed to be the effect of what they called democracy?
A myriad murmured desperately at every opportunity.
What could compete with that massive indelicacy?
Clementi had learned the effects of what was being called democracy.
She felt imposed upon from every direction.
Seven strophes of which the numbers of sentences in successive strophes follow
the sequence of cardinal numbers 1 through 7. Diastic text selection utilizing
a mix of sentences by Charles Hartshorne, Gertrude Stein, Lewis Carroll, and
Gerard Manley Hopkins as source text and the poem’s epigraph as seed text
produced a non-grammatical text from which the author “took off” when composing
the poem. Words were modified, added, deleted, etc., as needed. Everything was tampered
with.
Jackson Mac Low
New York: 9-13 October 2003; 14-15 April, 15 May 2004
____
Reprinted from The Poker, no. 6 (2005). Copyright ©2005 by Jackson
Mac Low.
Permission to reprint granted by Anne Tardos.
No comments:
Post a Comment