Freely Revised and Edited: Anarchist Authorship in Jackson Mac Low's the Stein Poems

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Freely Revised and Edited: Anarchist Authorship in Jackson Mac Low's the Stein Poems Freely Revised and Edited: Anarchist Authorship in Jackson Mac Low’s The Stein Poems Dani Spinosa York University t might seem strange that in order to write about anarchism and Iauthorship in the poetry of Jackson Mac Low, I write not about his early poems in which he pushes the limits of chance, spontaneity, improvisation, deterministic methods, and computer systems designed to produce diastic poems1 but, rather, about his often critically neglected poetic sequence, The Stein Poems, composed between 1998 and 2003, ending just a year before his death. Among some of the last poems he ever wrote, The Stein Poems serve as a kind of combination of a lifetime of experimentation with indeterminacy and chance. As he himself asserted in a cover letter sent 1 The term “diastic” refers to a paragrammatic procedure Mac Low developed in order to produce deterministic poems. In a diastic poem, a source text is selected (sometimes at random) and then a seed text is used to select certain words from the source text. Words are selected based on the placement of the letters, so the first letter of the first word of the seed text is used to find a word in the source text with the same letter at the start of the word. Subsequently, the second word is chosen provided it has the second letter of the seed text in its own second letter position. “Stein 72,” for example, uses as its source text, part 1, stanza 6 of Gertrude Stein’s “Stanzas in Meditation.” Its seed text is Mac Low’s son, Mordecai-Mark’s, name. The poem reads “more not more to-day forget.” The poem ends here because the system was unable to find a word after “forget” in which the “e” was in the fifth position (Thing of Beauty 401). ESC 41.2–3 (June/September 2015): 91–107 accompanying a submission of some of these poems for journal publica- tion: “I returned to using a deterministic procedure in April 1998, when I began writing the poems in the Stein series, but now I always, to some Dani Spinosa holds extent, modify the results of the procedure, making personal decisions of a doctorate from York different kinds. My writingways came together” (Thing of Beauty 376). In University. Her work The Stein Poems, Mac Low returns to deterministic methods of writing, focuses on experimental which he had more or less abandoned, only to adapt these chance-based methods of reading procedures by making clear (and unapologetic) the moments in which his and writing with a individual taste intervened in, or added on to, the deterministic process. particular emphasis In this article I argue that The Stein Poems bridge the gap between the on digital and activist anti-egoic poetics popularized throughout Mac Low’s career by the avant- intervention, and her garde (and especially by artists like John Cage, whom I will discuss further). most recent work focuses Occupying a unique mediatory position, The Stein Poems showcase Mac on the recognition of Low’s anarchist poetics in that they produce texts that function not as Canada’s contributions utopian dreams or political tracts but, instead, as what Mac Low himself to electronic literature. terms “analogies of free communities.” The poems encourage the reader She can be found online to perform interventionary tactics in the production of meaning and to at www.genericpronoun. play a significant role in the meaning-making of the poems themselves. com. Ultimately, I use the unique position of The Stein Poems to argue that Mac Low’s anarchist poetics and politics are best understood not necessarily or exclusively in relation to aleatoric or nonintentional writing methods but primarily in relation to the role of the reader (who is thus performer and perceiver) in this quasi-intentional work. To do this I should first look to chance and the role of the ego in his work more generally and how his grappling with these issues led to the composition of The Stein Poems. It would seem from Mac Low’s publication history that his writings about and discussions of the chance-based work of John Cage is what sparked the decision to produce The Stein Poems in this fashion. Cage and Mac Low were friends and often colleagues, but it was not until after Cage’s death in 1992 that Mac Low started to write critically about his work. Pub- lished in Richard Kostelanetz’s Writings about John Cage (1993), Mac Low’s article “Something about the Writings of John Cage,” examined, specifically and critically, the role of taste and authorial intent in Cage’s chance-based work. He then revised and expanded the article as “Cage’s Writings up to the Late 1980s” for inclusion in David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch’s Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, + Art. At the same time, he was engaged in the composition of 154 Forties, poems written in a more traditional compositional method, incorporating an emphasis on prosody and caesural spaces. In 1998, between the two Cage articles, Mac Low, as he stated in the quotation above, “returned” to deterministic 92 | Spinosa methods, but it was under the caveat that he no longer pretended that this was not, ultimately, an egoic process. This decision was clearly triggered, at least in part, by Mac Low’s work on Cage, in which he rails against those who misinterpreted or misunderstood Cage as having refused or eliminated the presence of the ego and its concomitant authorial intent via indeterminacy. For Cage, Mac Low writes, “chance was always constrained, to a greater or lesser extent, by his intentions” (“Cage’s Writings” 231), and later, “He knew very well that if he did anything at all, it would be done by or through his ego” (232). For Mac Low the complete removal of the author’s ego was impossible, but he nonetheless maintained that “[t]he point is not whether [Cage] ever entirely evaded his individual ego and its predilections, but that he diminished to some extent the value-judging activity of the ego that excludes possibilities” (“Cage’s Writings” 227). Of course Mac Low was always aware of the egoism involved in chance-based and deterministic writing methods. In his two seminal poet- ics pieces, “Statement” and “Some Remarks to the Dancers,” both collected in the highly influential The Poetics of the New American Poetry (1973), he touches on the role of choice in chance-based texts. In “Statement,” he asserts that the author is not a dictator over a text but is a co-initiator of action and is thus encouraged to produce, even (or especially) by means outside of his/her control, “absolutely unique situations” (385). In “Some Remarks to the Dancers,” he notes that although his sequence The Pro- nouns: A Collection of 40 Dances for the Dancers used “chance” to create the poems, by way of a filing card system he devised, some “crucial features” were matters of free choice (390–91). Michael O’Driscoll similarly argues that “one can trace throughout Mac Low’s career an increasing restlessness about the precise definition of ‘chance,’ and a growing skepticism about the role the aleatoric might actually play in the composition of his works” (111). O’Driscoll traces this skepticism and restlessness back to the 1968 completion of 22 Light Poems and Mac Low’s movement to the Stanzas for Iris Lezak. With the 22 Light Poems, O’Driscoll contends, Mac Low breaks with “chance” proper and turns instead to almost confessional personal writing. We can thus deduce that by 1973, Mac Low had clearly begun to think critically about the relationship between chance and authorship. Indeed the “mid-1970s are pivotal years for Mac Low’s development,” as Patrick Durgin notes, wherein “the intermedial works of the 1960s were at last being published and thus promoted outside the relatively insular sphere of the nyc avant-garde” (np). But, it was not really until after Cage’s death nearly two decades later, and his subsequent work on Cage’s use of chance, that Mac Low was able to re-evaluate his views on indeterminacy Freely Revised and Edited | 93 and to arrive at the medial position between chance and choice that we see demonstrated in The Stein Poems. That is to say that The Stein Poems occupy a mediatory position between chance and choice, between nonintentional and intentional writing.2 Mac Low’s discussions of Cage’s authorship caused him to re-evaluate what precisely constituted a nonintentional text or a deterministically produced text, and he eventually argues that these two terms are actually quite differ- ent. He notes that, sparked by a discussion with his son, an astrophysicist, he realized that although his systemic reading through text-selection pro- cedures were “nonintentional”—“in that [he] cannot predict to any extent what will be brought into a text through using them” (“Cage’s Writings” 224)—they are also “deterministic” in that “if followed out to the letter, they must find, and bring into the work being written, the same linguistic units in the source texts each time” (225). The element of chance, of the indeterminate, is further a third term, represented in the procedures by way of “human errors (and when these methods are automated, computer errors)” that “provide an unlooked-for but inevitable element of chance” (225). While the author has relative control over the procedures, as co- initiator of their actions, and while this process is necessarily born out of the ego, it also destabilizes the position of the writing subject. The many elements of authorship innate in Mac Low’s deterministic/unintentional methods produce an excess of authorship.
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