Jackson Mac Low

Mac Low received his associate's degree from the University of Chicago in 1941—where he continued to take graduate courses in philosophy and literature into 1943—and his bachelor's degree in ancient Greek from the evening division of Brooklyn College in 1958. 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. His work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication that experimented with language and meaning-making. In 1969 he produced computer-assisted poetry for the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 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 City. 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. ==Posthumously published work==

In 2005, Granary Books published Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces, 1955-2002. In 2008, Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works was published, edited by Anne Tardos. In 2012, Counterpath Press released 154 Forties, a collection of poems written and revised by Mac Low between 1990 and 2001, edited by Anne Tardos. Counterpath also completed a project of shooting videos of contemporary poets and artists reading the Forties. In 2015, Chax Press released THE COMPLETE LIGHT POEMS: 1–60 , edited by Anne Tardos and Michael O'Driscoll. In 2025, the MIT Press published The Complete Stein Poems, 1998-2003, edited by Michael O'Driscoll. ==Composition==

One type of non-intentional composition that Mac Low used relied on an technique 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. Chance operations Jackson Mac Low is known for using chance and experimentation in the production of his diastic poems. He engaged in projects that would extract words from the work of other poets and writers through a specific system he devised in order to produce a new poem. He would often extract these words from texts he was reading on the subway during his commutes. One such example is Mac Low's "Call Me Ishmael", developed from the source text Moby Dick by Herman Melville. "Call Me Ishmael" is a phrase from "Loomings", the first chapter of the book. Mac Low moved chronologically through the book after finding the phrase extracted from the source text, "Call Me Ishmael," and allowing the first letter of each word in each stanza to spell out "Call Me Ishmael." Additionally, he played with the repetition of the letter "L" in the third and fourth word of each stanza by allowing the fourth word to repeat the third. For example, the poem starts with the line "Circulation. And long long", spelling out the first part of the source-text phrase, "Call." The Stein series, between 1998 and 2003, marks one of his final projects. Despite their mechanical nature, many of these chance poems open up space for sentimentality and delicate interpretation. One example of this is Jackson Mac Low's "Light Poems" that consisted of sentences randomly chosen from a chart documenting different kinds of light. In "32nd Light Poem: In Memorandum Paul Blackburn 9–10 October 1971," Mac Low uses this system of chance to pay respects to a late friend. The poem goes: "Let me choose the kinds of light/ to light the passing of my friend." Although the process appears mechanical, the poems themselves reveal grief and other emotions that appear to be at odds with the process by which they were developed. ==Awards==

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's Echoes for a book of poetry published in 1994. == Personal life ==

Mac Low was a pacifist and "anarchist-populist". ==Selected works==

• A Piece for Sari Dienes (1960) • 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 (Station Hill Press,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) • Stein Series (1998–2003) • 20 Forties (1999) • Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces, 1955–2002 (Granary Books, 2005) • Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, 1937-2004 (2008) • 154 Forties (Counterpath, 2012) • The Complete Light Poems: 1-60 (2015) • The Complete Stein Poems. 1998-2003 (2025) ==References==