Jackson Mac Low

Jackson Mac Low (September 12, 1922 – December 8, 2004) was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright.

Life
Mac Low received his associate's degree from the University of Chicago in 1943, where he continued study in philosophy and literature into 1945, and his bachelor's degree in Ancient Greek from Brooklyn College in 1953. From 1957 onward, Mac Low worked as an etymologist, writer of reference-book articles, copy editor, indexer, proofreader, and fact checker for many publishers, including Knopf, Funk & Wagnalls, Pantheon, Bantam, and Macmillan. Beginning in 1981, Mac Low and Anne Tardos wrote, directed, and performed in seven radioworks.

From 1964 through 1980, Mac Low participated as a visual artist, composer, poet, and performer in the Annual Festivals of the Avant-Garde in New York. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In 1969 he produced computer-assisted poetry for the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

He was married to Anne Tardos. He wrote 31 books. His work has been published in more than 90 anthologies and periodicals and read publicly, exhibited, performed, and broadcast in North and South America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. He read, performed, and lectured in New York and throughout North America, Europe, and New Zealand, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Asnières, Paris, Bouliac (near Bordeaux), Marseilles, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and New York.

In 1986 he received a Fulbright travel grant for New Zealand, where he was the keynote speaker at the Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association conference at the University of Auckland. He also participated in a composers’ conference and led a workshop in Nelson, New Zealand. He read, performed, was interviewed, and led workshops in Wellington, Dunedin, and Auckland as well.

In 1989 Mac Low participated in the Fine Arts Festival at the University of North Carolina. From 1990 to 1991, Mac Low served on the poetry panel of the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 1993, Mac Low and Anne Tardos gave a joint concert of their works for voices with prerecorded tapes at Experimental Intermedia, New York. In January 1996 he presented readings and performances at Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In 2000, Mac Low performed two readings of his poetry at the Bjørnson Festival 2000 in Molde, Norway. He also unveiled a monument to Kurt Schwitters on an island off Molde.

Writing
Mac Low is known to readers of his poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which he first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian 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 with Anne Tardos.

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 spitting

Insectivorous nutriment species encounter Charles to Are species species are species species insectivorous nutriment species

Recognition
In 1985, Mac Low won a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1988 he was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry by the New York Foundation for the Arts. He shared an America Award with Robert Creeley for a book of poetry published in 1994. In 1999, he received a Dorothea Tanning Award from The Academy of American Poets and a Wallace Stevens Award.

Publications

 * The Twin Plays (1966)
 * Verdurous Sanguinaria (1967)
 * August Light Poems (1967)
 * 22 Light Poems (Black Sparrow, 1968)
 * 23rd Light Poem (For Larry Eigner, 1969)
 * Stanzas for Iris Lezak (Something Else Press, 1971)
 * 4 trains (1974)
 * 36th Light Poem (Buster Keaton, 1975)
 * 21 Matched Asymmetries (1978)
 * 54th Light Poem: For Ian Tyson (1978)
 * A Dozen Douzains for Eve Rosenthal (1978)
 * phone (1978)
 * The Pronouns—A Collection of 40 Dances—For the Dancers (Station Hill Press, 1979)
 * Asymmetries 1-260 (1980)
 * "Is That Wool Hat My Hat?" (1982)
 * Bloomsday (1984)
 * French Sonnets (1984)
 * Eight Drawing-Asymmetries (1985)
 * The Virginia Woolf Poems (Burning Deck, 1985)
 * Representative Works: 1938-1985 (1986)
 * Words nd Ends from Ez (Avenue B, 1989)
 * Twenties: 100 Poems (1991)
 * 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)
 * From Pearl Harbor Day to FDR's Birthday (1995)
 * Barnesbook (1996)
 * 20 Forties (1999)
 * Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 1955–2002 (Granary Books, 2005)