Mac Low, Jackson

A performance artist and the author of more than two dozen books of experimental verse, Mac Low was born in Chicago in 1922 and educated at the University of Chicago (1939-1943) and Brooklyn College (1955-1958). He has worked as a music teacher, an English teacher, a translator, and an editor.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Chicago, Ill. on Sept. 12, 1922, Jackson Mac Low spent his grade school years studying music and poetry. In 1939, he entered the University of Chicago to study philosophy, leaving there in 1943 with an Associate of Arts Degree and relocating to New York City. In 1955, Mac Low enrolled in Brooklyn College, where he completed a Bachelors of Arts program in Greek in 1958. The bachelors degree allowed Mac Low to secure a number of better paying and more flexible jobs, thus giving him time for his artistic career. He worked as reference-book editor and taught courses at New York University.

In February 1962, Mac Low married the painter Iris Lezak. In 1963 they gave birth to a son, Mordecai-Mark and, in 1966, to a daughter, Clarinda. Mac Low and Iris Lezak divorced in 1978, and twelve years later he married Anne Tardos, a poet, composer, multimedia artist.

Mac Low is the author of some thirty books of poetry, four playscripts, and numerous critical statements. His work has been published by a range of trade and fine presses, and individual pieces have appeared in a great number of poetry journals. Mac Low is known to most readers as an ardent practioneer of chance operations in poetry composition, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. But the poet Ron Silliman has suggested that is a smaller part of Mac Low's overall importance. As Silliman explains, "Mac Low was more or less alone in the 1950s in his explorations of poetic form as system (to my mind a far more important implication of his work than his use of chance operations, whaich are merely one type of system)."

Mac Low's interest in poetry as system dates from 1954, when he used a chance operation to generate the text "5 biblical poems." The poems he wrote during the previous sixteen years were more conventional expressions of the writers emotions and reflections. Most of these early poems have not yet been published (a handful do appear in the collection REPRESENTATIVE WORKS, 1986), but are present in Mac Low's archive.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Mac Low's writing became prolific and more experimentally daring or reliant on what Mac Low describes as non-intentional methods. THE MARRING MAIDEN, a theatrical work, was first performed by the Living Theatre in during the 1960-1961 season. A performance piece, action in the play was determined by action cards given to actors at random intervals and by the director's scenarios. The plays language was determined using the I CHING. In STANZAS FOR IRIS LEZAK, a nearly 400 page work written in 1960 but published twelve years later, was generated from an assortment of religious and scientific texts, newspapers, and whatever else the poet was reading at the time. A year later, Mac Low composed ASYMMETRIES 1-501, an investigation of irregular poetic form, unlike the regular forms acheived in STANZAS FOR IRIS LEZAK.

In 1967, Mac Low's VERDUROUS SANGUINARIA was performed in Yoko Ono's loft as part of a series of "happenings" organized by La Monte Young. This work was generated from chance operations applied to twenty-six dictionaries, and it is the only work of Mac Low's to have yet been published by a university press. THE PRONOUNS, also written in the 1960s, was composed as a book of poems and a score for actions. The work, which Jerome Rothenberg describes as taking "hold of those old workhorses of our language," was conceived as a score for dance. While it has been performed infrequently, the work has become recognized as Mac Low's most anthologized composition. Other works rendered during this period include 22 LIGHT POEMS (1968), THE VIRIGINIA WOOLF POEMS (1985), WORDS ND ENDS FROM EZ (1989) and 42 MERZGEDICHTE IN MEMORIAM KURT SCHWITTERS (1994). Collectively they reveal the various generative methods and source texts Mac Low employed in composing his texts.

From a formal point of view, 1954 marks a rupture in Mac Low's career, as conventional intentional strageties are displaced by non-intentional strategies. But from a political perspective there is a certain and problematic continuity. Mac Low has always been a political activist, a self-proclaimed pacifist-anarchist. This political stance is evident in the content of the verse written before 1954, as it is also in the Mac Low's activity as an editor of anarchist publication. After 1954 and Mac Low's increasing use of non-intentional strategies, the politcal stance is shifted to the poem's form and becomes actualized in the transaction between the text and the reader. As Bruce Campbell has explained, Mac Low has no desire "to be a dictator....Instead Mac Low wants to 'empower' the reader....The reader is not someone who simply gazes upon the work or arrives at a prefabricated meaning; the reader helps to make the meaning." In short, using non-intentional strategies allows Mac Low to alter radically the power relationship of conventional author / reader transactions.

Mac Low's work, because of its experimental and difficult characteristics, has not received a strong general audience; it has been most enthusiastically read by poets broadly interested in some of the same poetic / aesthetic values Mac Low investigates in his texts. Nevertheless, Mac Low has been the recipient of several awards: two Creative Artists Public Service Program fellowships (1973-74 and 1976-77), a National Endowments for the Arts fellowship (1976), a Guggenheim Memorial fellowship (1985), a Fulbright fellowship (1986) and, more recently, The Fund for Poetry awards (1988-89 and 1991-92).

Mac Low continues to reside in New York City with his wife Anne Tardos.