- Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low (
September 12 ,1922 –December 8 ,2004 ) was an Americanpoet ,performance artist ,composer andplaywright , known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work ofJohn Cage ,Earle Brown , andChristian Wolff .One type of non-intentional composition that he used relied on an algorithm he dubbed "diastic," by analogy to
acrostic . He used words or phrases drawn from source material to spell out a source word or phrase, with the first word having the first letter of the source, the second word having the second letter, and so forth, reading through ("dia" in Greek) the source. During the last 25 years of his life, he often collaborated withAnne Tardos .Mac Low won the 1999
Wallace Stevens award.He received his
associate's degree from theUniversity of Chicago in 1943, where he continued study in philosophy and literature into 1945, and hisbachelor's degree inAncient Greek fromBrooklyn College in 1953.From "Insect Assassins"
Injects "no survive." Efforts control the
Animal "survive. Survive". Animal "survive. Survive". Injects no survive.In nasty spitting eye cost. This
Assassin spitting spitting assassin spitting spitting in nasty spittingInsectivorous nutriment species encounter Charles to
Are species species are species species insectivorous nutriment specieselected Works
*"22 Light Poems" (Black Sparrow, 1968)
*"Stanzas for Iris Lezak" (Something Else Press, 1971)
*"The Pronouns" (Station Hill Press, 1979)
*"The Virginia Woolf Poems" (Burning Deck, 1985)
*"Pieces o' Six: Thirty-Three Poems in Prose" (Sun and Moon Classics, 1991)
*"Twenties "(Segue, January 1992)
*"42 Merzgedichte in memoriam Kurt Schwitters" (Station Hill Press, 1994)
*"Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 1955–2002" (Granary Books, 2005)ource
*Von Gunden, Heidi (1983). "The Music of Pauline Oliveros". ISBN 0-8108-1600-8.
External links
* [http://www.jacksonmaclow.com Jackson Mac Low website]
* [http://www.schoenbooks.com/wordpress/?p=156 A Blog Catalog] in Honor of Mac Low's Birthday, with images of his books
* [http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/67 Academy of American Poets]
* [http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/maclow/ SUNY Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center]
* [http://chax.org/eoagh/issue2.htm In Remembrance of Jackson Mac Low] "EOAGH" (Issue#2) includes poems and remembrances on-line
* [http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/testing/html/mss0180a.html The Register of Jackson Mac Low Papers 1923-1995] @ Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego
* [http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/post11.html Jackson Mac Low in Virtual Space] a remembrance byBarrett Watten , including links to other Mac Low sites
*worldcat id|id=lccn-n79-75613:
:US-poet-stub
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