Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004)

2 wonderfully 'bizarre' plays. When one thinks of a play as a group of people enacting something & dispenses w/ any expectation of linear narrative or overtly connected discursiveness, then the results can consist partially of play conversations like this:

E. Roper
D. Trine-erupt rutin; enact react?
C. Train price pinct; trace-price raper trier count - retap antre price?
E. Reacy-retap.
D. Print trine recap-antre.

For me, things like this that disrupt 'normal' discourse are slate-cleansers: they enable the perceivers (whether participants or audience) to reappraise their relationship w/ words & dialogs & to be REFRESHED. & lest you think that these are meant to be harsh disciplinary actions for the sheeplike audience, I remember Jackson telling me (probably in the late 1970s about 15 yrs after these plays were written) that he considered himself to be an entertainer. This sd in the context of discussions about whether one's work was didactic or for amusement, etc - a common discourse. Perhaps most people wdn't be entertained by such a play but I probably wd be & I'm particularly entertained by Jackson's thinking of them as entertaining.… (meer)

I have a signed copy from Jackson from 1978 - wch wd've been right around when I 1st met him or shortly thereafter. Each letter in each word has an assigned pitch. There are 10 letters in Moore's name - hence there are 10 pitches. MacLow was one of the most methodical of the scorers of performance poetry & this piece is a nice example. What's shown here as the 'cover' is the score. Its backside is the instructions as to how to perform it. I dug this out of my artist's bk box & I'm finding so much great stuff there that it's tempting to perform a whole concert based on scores like this one.… (meer)

review of
Jackson Mac Low's 42 Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 12, 2015

My full(ish) analysis is here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/395043-preface-to-x-number-of-merzpoems-in-...
& it's got a nifty title.

It was as recently as last mnth that I wrote that "my top 5 of greatest 20th century (dead) poets" includes "Tolson, Zukovsky, & Mac Low" ( https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/389462-tolson ). I was being hyperbolic for affect but, still, I seriously value Mac Low's work highly. Nonetheless, this is the 1st bk by him that I've read in its entirety &, really, I have to admit that "my top 5 of greatest 20th century (dead) [or still alive] poets" wd have to include at least 50 poets: there's really no "top 5" for me. I'd also have to admit my positive feelings for Mac Low's work are deeply rooted in what my (admittedly limited) personal interactions w/ him were like.

As I recall, the Merzaum Collective (esp Kirby Malone & Marshall Reese) brought Jackson to perform at the Red Door Hall in Baltimore in 1977 or 1978. That must've been when I 1st met him & I'm not sure whether I knew of his work by then. I was fairly aware of a large amt of Fluxus work by then so I might've encountered Mac Low's. It might've been during this visit that I gave Jackson a copy of my 1st bk, t he bk (etc) ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2536352.t_he_book_t_he_referent_4_wch_consist... ). Dating my encounters w/ him in the late '70s is a bit vague for me now.

I do remember being in someone's Baltimore apt (Kirby's?) & showing jackson some of my writings, particularly writing I'd done w/ just numbers, & having him respond very positively to them. That was close to unprecedented. Those number writings were so abstruse & so d liberately d void of convention that it's hard for me to imagine anyone getting anything out of them but when I explained them to Jackson he was right there w/ it.

I attended that New York Avant-Garde festival in 1979. I remember Dick Higgins giving me a brochure for his fairly new Printed Editions publications (Something Else must've ended shortly before). I probably wd've met Mac Low then too. There were so many great people participating in that.

Mac Low was also generous enuf to give me a copy of his bk Asymmetries 1-260 (published by Printed Editions) & to inscribe it to me thusly: "For Michael (Tolson) with best wishes (Keep yer chinup! — er . . .) Jackson (Mac Low) Balto. 3/30/81" - so he must've been in BalTimOre again at that time but I don't remember that at all. I've never read that completely b/c I've tried to read it in accordance w/ the performance instructions wch slowed me down to a halt. W/ that in mind can I really blame the many people I've given bks & movies & audio recordings to who've never read them or witnessed them or listened to them? (Yes, I can.)

On January 9, 1982, I gave a reading at the EAR INN in NYC. I'd made Frame-of-Reference shaped cards w/ text on them that were intended to be my only conversational materials. One of the cards had this written on it: "I'V D CIDED 2 ONLY READ 2DAY, SO, I'V WRITTEN 60 CARDS OF SENTENCES I'V ANTICIPATED WANTING 2 SAY." Another one had: "WAIT, PLEEZ, UNTIL I FIND T HE CARD." At least 12 of them were addressed to specific people, Jackson wasn't one of them but he was there. He was also the person who called me out when I read the only card that had 2 sentences on it instead of one. He was paying attn.

On September 12, 1982, I attended an all-day celebration of Jackson's birthday in a church in NYC where many amazing folks performed his work. I must've talked to him then, too. In retrospect, it seems like I must've crossed paths w/ Mac Low a fair amt in the late '70s & early '80s. I was certainly in NYC, where Jackson lived, more then then in any time since.

I don't recall seeing him again until 1989 in Rockville, MD, at the historic John Cage birthday Music Circus. I wd've given him a copy of the 1st edition of my bk How to Write a Resumé - Volume II: Making a Good First Impression (the 2nd edition is reviewed online here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2558817.How_to_Write_a_Resum_Volume_II_Making... ).

Then there was a long pause until I was in Melbourne, Australia, in 2000 at Warren Burt's place & Warren was having an email exchange w/ Jackson in wch Jackson sd to tell me HI. I was touched that Mac Low wd remember me after all those yrs. Such reminiscing might be boorish to the reader but it's important to me. Not only was Mac Low always supportive of my work, not only did he seem to GET IT when just about no-one else did, but he was also consistently warm & intelligent. My experience of him was 100% positive. I shd write a Yelp review praising him!

Wch brings me up to this bk. I was in Boulder, CO, maybe in 2011, when I found it in a used bkstore. Finding Jackson's bks is rare & I was very excited. Making it even better is that it's brought to us by Station Hill Press, one of my favorite publishers.

SO, I've finally read an entire bk by Jackson. At 1st I was somewhat disappointed, it seemed like a bit of a waste of paper. Then, it grew on me, I got more & more engaged in the permutations, in the fragmentation, in the obsessive rewriting, in the process. On the back of the bk there's a blurb by Robert Kelly. I've met Kelly & vaudeoed him for my movie on Franz Kamin & quite liked him. That sd, his poetry is far more traditional than what my usual interests are. As such, it might seem surprising that he'd blurb a Mac Low bk but it's not. Kelly's a Bard prof, Bard's not too far from where Station Hill is, all these folks are friends. Kelly wrote:

"I woke up one morning thinking I have this advantage over Kurt Schwitters, that at least I'm alive, whereas he's dead. Then I happened out to the mailbox and found there a typescript of Jackson Mac Low's 42 Merzgedichte and now I'm not so sure. The greatest American poet of Make It New has gone traveling in the unstable skyey spaciness inside some texts, may of them by and about Schwitters. And he's been talking them over. Now Kurt Schwitters has something more to say. The genial, vivid humanity of Mac Low converses tunefully with the joyous dignity of Schwitters"

There's more to Kelly's blurb but that's a pretty good taste. Kelly really nails it & it doesn't matter that his own poetry isn't as experimentally inclined (at least what I've read) as Mac Low's, Kelly still really understands.

I'm assuming, probably incorrectly, that most readers of this review will already be familiar w/ Schwitters' work, esp his Merz collages from detritus, & that it's, therefore, not necessary for me to go into them here. Instead, I'll focus on the computer-assisted nature of much of the work. Mac Low writes in his introduction:

"Then soon after I began writing on computers, early in 1987, I completed the first draft of "Pieces o' Siz -- XXXI" (whose first sentence had been written in the Louvre in July 1986): the "six" became the number of computer pages in the first draft.

"Thus it was that I began writing an "hommage" to Schwitters on my computer as "Pieces o' Six -- XXXII," and because of its subject and dedicatee, I decided to take advantage of the typographical possibilities (e.g., changes of character format corresponding to changes of "voice") offered by the computer (limited as they were at the time by the capabilities of my word processor and my dot-matrix printer). I also adopted a collage method involving "impulse-chance" appropriations, adaptations, paraphrases, etc., mainly from two books lent me by the poet, essaying, and psychoanalyst Nick Piombino" -
p vii

Piombino, by the by, is on GoodReads.

I'm hardly an expert on the history of using computers for writing. Of course, I don't mean the history of simply writing w/ computers, I mean the history of using computers to do special things w/ writing. There's the term "Code Poetry" that, if I understand correctly, refers to poetry that somehow references or engages w/ computer encoding. I have a bk about it somewhere in the piles-of-bks-waiting-to-be-read but I cdn't find it just now. I wonder if Mac Low's in it? It might mainly feature more recent writers. Still, I think of Jackson as a pioneer of such writing. This bk was written between 1987 & 1989 & it's heavily dependent on software for quasi-chance permutations.

I, too, have used computers to generate text manipulations of various types. Perhaps my earliest was my "computer etc" published in DOC(K)S in 1981 as "prikalkulilo ktp" (an Esperanto translation) visible here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/W1981prikalkulilo.html . Another notable example being ""Corrected" Dyslexic Variations" published in (S)CRAP 6 (1988) & ottotole (Number 3, Spring 1989). "Lost in Translation" (self published in an abridged form, 1997) came next. "diSTILLed Life / rfeEINr Ashairenm / reFINEr Anarchism / reINfer Arachnism" being probably the most recent piece of note (created: December, 2003; published in Vertov from Z to A: February, 2008). To any publishers out there reading this review, I'd love to see those works collected into one bk (hint, hint). But enuf self-promo, back to Mac Low:

"I called "Pieces o' Six -- XXXII" a "Merzgedicht [MERZ poem] in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters" because of both its subject matter and its collage-like structure. However, when I wrote it, I had no idea that it was the first of a series of Merzgedichte. But soon after I finished it, I derived a chance-operational method that used random digits (generated by a simple Turbo-C program) and the "glossary" capabilities of my word processor, Microsoft Word, to select certain linguistic units from "Pieces o' Six -- XXXII" and to juxtapose them and place them on the pages in entirely new constellations. When I completed the first poem produced by this method, the "2nd Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters," I realized that a new series of poems had sprouted from the "Pieces o' Sex" (like a new bough branching from an older one near its end)." - p viii

Indeed, 42 Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters isn't just a new bough, it's a whole new tree grown to venerable substance. Some of these poems are additionally dedicated to Charles O. Hartman who provided Mac Low w/ some of the software necessary for the permutations.

"Prof. Hartman also sent me the latest version of TRAVESTY, a program that generates "pseudo-texts," written by the critic Hugh Kenner and the computer scientist Joseph O'Rourke and first published in BYTE magazine in November 1984. In their words, TRAVESTY used "English letter-combination frequencies . . . to generate random text that mimics the frequencies found in a sample. Though nonsensical, these pseudo-texts have a haunting plausibility, preserving as they do many recognizable mannerisms of the texts from which they are derived. . . . [F]or an order-n scan, every n-character sequence in the output occurs somewhere in the input, and at about the same frequency." According to what "order" of "travesty" one chooses to generate, one, one may generate either texts that seem fairly close to normal English or ones that are far from it.

"I utilized these programs in different ways, employing earlier Merzgedicht as source texts: (1) For the 31st Merzegedicht, I ran the 25th Merzgedicht through
DIASTEXT alone. (2) For the 32nd, I ran the 4th through DIASTEXT alone. (3) For the 33rd, I ran the 2nd through DIASTEX4 alone. (4) For the 34th, I ran the 8th through DIASTEX4 alone. (5) For the 35th, I ran the 9th through DIASTEX4 alone. (6) And for the 36th through the 42nd, I ran the 29th first through TRAVESTY, asking for "low-order" output--i.e., scanning for sequences of very few characters, to insure the outputting predominantly of letter strings that aren't real words (pseudo-words), along with a few real words, most of them embedded in pseudo-words--and then through DIASTEX4. I also submitted the output, in most cases, to certain systematic types of postediting, mainly of format and capitalization, some of which amounted to final chance operations." - p ix

That may seem dreadfully dry to many readers but to readers such as myself it results in challenging reading. A large part of what made it enjoyable for me was going thru the slow & laborious process of taking discursive text & so fragmenting it that it becomes functional at a different level. In the "1st Merzgedicht the text is in sentences, some of wch describe Schwitters:

"Even close friends found it difficult to reconcile Schwitters' jovial, extrovert, and clownish nature with the seriousness of his commitment to art. The liveliness of Schwitters' art may well have arisen from the widely noted contradictoriness of his existence, and that very contradictoriness prevented Merz from becoming an ideology, allowing him to embrace a myriad of materials and methods and to approach, willy-nilly, imitating nature in its manner of operation." - p 4

But by the 37th Merzgedicht there're lines like this:

"OvOcarammmGer luTO

BaumeTruPT hirlied ging." - p 205

& the reading experience of getting there proved quite entertaining for me. It was during the reading of the 2nd thru 7th Merzgedichte that I was thinking that this was a waste of paper. There just wasn't enuf development to keep me interested. But by the 8th the ante was upped (presented here in very incorrect formatting):

"Schwitters' jovial, extrovert, and clownish
nature carefully cropped details from printers' reject
material
Merzbau Hannover, begun by Schwitters around 1923 and" - p 28

By the 9th Merzgedicht new material creeped in that wasn't in the 1st one:

"A typical Schwitters collage, such as Mz 271 Kammer [Cupboard], combines the formal stability of the grid format with carefully plotted diagonal movements that enliven the rectilinear geometry without diminishing its solidity." - p 35

Similarly, more new material appears in the 12th:

"The slogans he composed for display on the municipal trolley line were especially popular.

"experience BUREAUCRATIC REGULATIONS RUBBER-STAMPED MESSAGES When the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, Schwitters escaped with his son to England, where he was interned for the first seventeen months.

"harmonically arranged colored rectangles, the colors, free of painterly modulations, treated as sheer, signatureless, anonymous coats of paint Futurism unaltered found materials stupidity of institutions AN IMAGE OF THE REVOLUTION Fluxus Hollow burns the stomach flame sulfur blood.

"Hülsenbeck excluded Schwitters from the Berlin Club Dada in 1920 because Schwitters was friendly with the Sturm circle and indifferent or opposed to Hülsenbeck's Leninism." - p 67

Somewhere along the line, excerpts from Schwitters' well-known sound poem "Ursonate" seep in. Not only do they assist in a mushroom-like breaking down of the conventional semantic material, but they infuse considerable new life. Here's the 1st 'pseudo-word' of the 13th Merzgedicht in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters: Pumpfftilfftoo? (p 70) - wch, as far as I can tell, is an alternate rendition of "Rummpfftillfftoooo?" ( http://www.costis.org/x/schwitters/ursonate.htm ).

Throughout these Merzgedichte, the reader encounters mention of the Merzbau being built to break thru the floor into the rm above the rm of its origin. There're some slight discrepancies in tellings of how long Schwitters worked on it & when he started. Still in the 13th Merzgedicht, the telling includes a greater expansion of the Merzbau's growth - alas, my retyping of it, again, doesn't show the original spacing:

"In the fourteen years Schwitters worked on the
Merzbau in Hannover, the edifice grew through the
ceiling of the original room,
broke through the wall of
adjoining chambers, and descended below the ground
into a subterranean cistern." - p 73

By the 14th Merzgedicht, some sentences & phrases stand out to me as key philosophical statements: "Meaningless elements stand alongside "clues," and no importance is attached to decoding. (p 82), "I called it MERZ: it was a prayer about the victorious end of the war, victorious as once again peace had won in the end; everything had broken down in any case and new things had to be made of fragments: and this is MERZ." (p 87)

Again in the 14th, a technique description: "carefully cropped details from printers' reject material" (p 83). Reading mention of this prompts me to inform the reader about Marshall Reese's bk entitled Writing (pod books, 1980) in wch the primary material is constructed entirely from printer rejects. As I recall, one California-based Language Writer was outraged that this bk got more attn than a more conventionally intentionally composed bk did that was contemporaneous to it. This shows that such dadaist technique still has some potency (or did at the time).

By the 16th Merzgedicht the writing becomes considerably more abstract, by the 17th, the lines breaks become considerably more fragmenting:

"or p

h

ras

e is written into the picture f

r

eehand." - p 108

& this fragmentation continues over considerably into the 18th Merzgedicht. By the 20th, sentences pull these fragments together again:

"Schwitters' jovial, clownish nature fragmented Helma's apartment floor.

"Pelikan sleekly in the whipair's jovial, extrovert nature experienced New York, perceived released from objects' mundane functions.

"Disaffection had THIS NAILING too.

"Bussum's featherbeds are Pelikan's scraps experience allows her to letter with ingenuity." - p 125

The 31st Merzgedicht is the 1st of the ones dedicated to Charles O. Hartman. It's also the longest (pp 161-196). the end note states:

"Derived from my "25th Merzgedicht in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters" (7/ 14/ 88), including its title, author's name, and date and place of composition, aided by Charles O. Hartman's text-selection program DIASTEXT (an automation of one of my diastic text-selection procedures developed in 1963). This is the first poem I made with the help of one of Prof. Hartman's programs." - p 196

At 1st I found reading this one particularly tedious. Then, I gave myself the challenge of mentally reading it aloud - ie: imagining how I'd articulate some of the unusual features:

"Bussu cunning cunning effect signal,
ound objec absurd erformerlecturertypographe urine
Hannov first
Ursonatea stampsodd mailing real.never required weisst utilityan
utilityan formation everything.The exileinterened
material.used fabricspasted appearance--had stationerywoodwire" - p 190

[The articulation continues here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/395043-preface-to-x-number-of-merzpoems-in-... ]… (meer)