Leevi Lehto: Poetry, Even Though It Looks Like It
(On Jackson Mac Low)

Published in Finnish in the Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat, in January 1993.
Translated by the Author

Finnish
Katkelma, a Jackson Mac Low poem translated into Finnish

In the attic of an old warehouse-made-into-an-apartment-building at a TriBeCa sidestreet, on top of creaking wooden stairs, almost next to the World Trade Center Twin Towers, the spirit of late John Cage (died in August) prevails.

Jackson Mac Low opens the door, asking me to come in, to take the shoes off, and to put on slippers.

An oblong space is full of shelves with books, painting equipment, cassettes. On the sofa next to the window there are volumes by Adorno and Habermas.

Afterwards, listening to the tape recorded during our meeting, I feel like there's more silence in it than speech. When Jackson Mac Low is not quietly pondering an answer, he's behind the shelves to get more material.

Books, cassettes, drawings, and photocopies of a work in computer graphics he's currently working at, together with his wife, Anne Tardos: In Memoriam Mr. Cage.

Anarchist And Mystic

Even the Finns know Mr. Cage, but who is this Mac Low?

A multi-artist, born in 1992 in Chicago, known - in US, in Germany, in Australia, in Japan... - as friend and close colleague to Cage.

A man who - perhaps alone in the world, and for over thirty years now - has seriously applied the principles of chance and randomness to poetry.

A confessional anarchist, and an unquestioned idol for many American poets, insurmountable in his extremeness much the way Duchamp and Warhol are in visual arts.

Composer and performance artist, whose first productions were staged in Yoko Ono's studio apartment in Manhattan.

Poet whose first aleatoric poem consisted of words randomly chosen from the Books of Moses, together with likewise random pauses, and with a motto from Büchner:

"Can't you hear it then? Can't you hear the terrible voice that is crying out the whole length of horizon and which is usually known as silence?..."

Who Writes?

Mac Low explains the various techniques for chance-based writing he has developed. Central among these are the acrostic method and the diastic method.

The term acrosticon refers to a text where the first letters of words spell out a word, a name, or a meaningful sentence. For an example in Finnish: Hän Itkee Lastaan Jonka Aina Itse Saa Uudestaan Uskomaan Sanoihinsa. (She cries for her child whom she again and again gets to believe her words; the Finnish sentence spells out "Hiljaisuus", silence.)

Mac Low's method makes an inverted use of this principle: he will take a code word - a title, the name of the writer - and then apply it to a given text. Ezra Pound's title, Cantos, applied to the work in question, yells the line:

"Curtains And No Thorough Oxygen Solutions"

In the diastic method even the place of the letter in words matters. For example:

"Clara mAggots fiNd whaT candOr / BringS."

Those who are amused by this kind of things, are instructed to leaf through Words nd Ends from Ez, one of Mac Low's most recent books, where Pound's entire Magnum Opus is submitted to a diastic reduction. This way:

n hUsk s fiNished
to tiDe's E
zRo hiRD n,
heaven,
"Paradiso"
e
Over zcUse 11
aNd paraDiso

This isn't translatable any more. The reader either goes into the trouble of reading through and making all the associations his/her sense of languages and humor permits, and enjoys - or gets mad and throws the book at the wall.

An anarchistic merriness, combined with a deadly serious attitude of a moralist - this might be the "contradiction" that best serves to characterize Jackson Mac Low's role as an artist.

At stake here is, of course, the eternal, yet constantly more and more acute question of an "author" or "self" behind works of art.

In Mac Low's word generators, this question also yields superb beauty, as seen from the fragment translated here beside. In it, the code is first the first word of the source text ("silence"), then the second ("island") and the third ("Lordship") words of the poem; at the word "praying" the source is exempted.

Kibran And The Greatest Fuck In Town

Even in Mac Low's aleatoric texts there's always an element of self involved - at least in choosing the source text and the code.

The most striking example of this might be Stanzas (1960), dedicated for Iris Lezak, where the source text is from Kahlil Gibran, while the code is provided by the phrases "My girl's the greatest fuck in town. I love to fuck my girl."

An other kind of meeting between chance and necessity is to be found in the reading instructions attached to various texts: Mac Low keeps strict control on pauses, reading speeds, sound volumes, yet leaving ample room for improvisation. - The order of lines in his first play, at the Living Theater in New York City (with music by John Cage), was determined by throw of dice.

In Jackson Mac Low's 80's work, there is a certain discernible shift toward more "purported" forms. Bloomsday (1984) consists mostly of normal text, while the one hundred poems of twenty lines each in Twenties (1991) were composed using free association: they consist of series of word and phrase fragments, and pauses, with the time and place of composition meticulously marked down.

Jackson Mac Low sells me a bunch of his books and a few cassettes, finds (finally) time to mention that his work owes a lot to Zen sources, forgets to write a receipt, asks if I know "Anselm Hollo" ("he's a very witty guy, and a good friend of mine"), accompanies me to the door, thanks me warmly for my interest, says goodbye.

In the subway, I read from the back-cover of Twenties what Mr. Cage wrote about him:

"(...) Poet, he 'sets all well afloat.' That's why his poetry, even though it looks like it, is poetry."

Jackson Mac Low in his TriBeCa apartment, October 1992. Photo(scanned from the paper) by Kari Sarkkinen