http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt709nb2cz No online items Register of the Jackson Mac Low Papers Mandeville Special Collections Library 0175S UC, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0175 Phone: (858) 534-2533 Fax: (858) 534-5950 Email: [email protected] Repository Website: http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/ © 1997 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Register of the Jackson Mac Low MSS 0180 1 Papers Jackson Mac Low Papers, 1923-1995 MSS 0180 Mandeville Special Collections Library UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO La Jolla, CA 92093-0175 Contact Information: Mandeville Special Collections Library 0175S UC, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0175 Phone: (858) 534-2533 Fax: (858) 534-5950 Email: [email protected] Repository Website: http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/ This file last updated: October 2003. Descriptive Summary Title: Jackson Mac Low Papers, Date (inclusive): 1923-1995 Collection number: MSS 0180 Creator: Mac Low, Jackson Extent: 33.15 linear feet(79 archives boxes, 1 records carton and 1 oversize folder) Repository: Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD La Jolla, CA 92093-0175 Abstract: Papers of Jackson Mac Low, a poet, composer and performance artist who has frequently used systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work. The bulk of the collection dates between 1937 and 1995. The collection contains notebooks (1948-1990); biographical material; correspondence (1943-1995); manuscripts of poetry, prose, essays, plays, music and performance instructions; writings of others; interviews with Mac Low; conference and residency documentation; posters and programs; and subject files. Prominent correspondents include Kathy Acker, Julian Beck, Carol Berge, Paul Blackburn, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Clayton Eshleman, Peter Ganick, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Donald Hall, Spencer Holst, Vera Lachmann, Denise Levertov, George Maciunas, Judith Malina, Steve McCaffery, Nam June Paik, Jerome Rothenberg, Ron Silliman, John Taggart, Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, and William Carlos Williams. The collection is arranged in ten series: 1) NOTEBOOKS, 2) BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL, 3) CORRESPONDENCE, 4) WRITINGS, 5) WRITINGS OF OTHERS, 6) INTERVIEWS, 7) CONFERENCES, FESTIVALS AND RESIDENCIES, 8) PROGRAMS AND POSTERS, 9) SUBJECT FILES, and 10) ORIGINALS OF PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPIES. Physical location: For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog. Language: English. Access Poems in Box 52, Folder 28 are restricted by the donor until 2020. Preferred Citation Jackson Mac Low Papers, MSS 0180. Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD. BIOGRAPHY Born in Chicago, Ill. on Sept. 12, 1922, Jackson Mac Low spent his grade school years studying music and poetry. In 1939, he entered the University of Chicago to study philosophy, leaving there in 1943 with an Associate of Arts Degree and relocating to New York City. In 1955, Mac Low enrolled in Brooklyn College, where he completed a Bachelors of Arts program in Greek in 1958. The bachelors degree allowed Mac Low to secure a number of better paying and more flexible jobs, thus giving him time for his artistic career. He worked as reference-book editor and taught courses at New York Register of the Jackson Mac Low MSS 0180 2 Papers University. In February 1962, Mac Low married the painter Iris Lezak. In 1963 they gave birth to a son, Mordecai-Mark and, in 1966, to a daughter, Clarinda. Mac Low and Iris Lezak divorced in 1978, and twelve years later he married Anne Tardos, a poet, composer, multimedia artist. Mac Low is the author of some thirty books of poetry, four playscripts, and numerous critical statements. His work has been published by a range of trade and fine presses, and individual pieces have appeared in a great number of poetry journals. Mac Low is known to most readers as an ardent practioneer of chance operations in poetry composition, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. But the poet Ron Silliman has suggested that is a smaller part of Mac Low's overall importance. As Silliman explains, "Mac Low was more or less alone in the 1950s in his explorations of poetic form as system (to my mind a far more important implication of his work than his use of chance operations, whaich are merely one type of system)." Mac Low's interest in poetry as system dates from 1954, when he used a chance operation to generate the text "5 biblical poems." The poems he wrote during the previous sixteen years were more conventional expressions of the writers emotions and reflections. Most of these early poems have not yet been published (a handful do appear in the collection REPRESENTATIVE WORKS, 1986), but are present in Mac Low's archive. In the 1960s and 1970s, Mac Low's writing became prolific and more experimentally daring or reliant on what Mac Low describes as non-intentional methods. THE MARRING MAIDEN, a theatrical work, was first performed by the Living Theatre in during the 1960-1961 season. A performance piece, action in the play was determined by action cards given to actors at random intervals and by the director's scenarios. The plays language was determined using the I CHING. In STANZAS FOR IRIS LEZAK, a nearly 400 page work written in 1960 but published twelve years later, was generated from an assortment of religious and scientific texts, newspapers, and whatever else the poet was reading at the time. A year later, Mac Low composed ASYMMETRIES 1-501, an investigation of irregular poetic form, unlike the regular forms acheived in STANZAS FOR IRIS LEZAK. In 1967, Mac Low's VERDUROUS SANGUINARIA was performed in Yoko Ono's loft as part of a series of "happenings" organized by La Monte Young. This work was generated from chance operations applied to twenty-six dictionaries, and it is the only work of Mac Low's to have yet been published by a university press. THE PRONOUNS, also written in the 1960s, was composed as a book of poems and a score for actions. The work, which Jerome Rothenberg describes as taking "hold of those old workhorses of our language," was conceived as a score for dance. While it has been performed infrequently, the work has become recognized as Mac Low's most anthologized composition. Other works rendered during this period include 22 LIGHT POEMS (1968), THE VIRIGINIA WOOLF POEMS (1985), WORDS ND ENDS FROM EZ (1989) and 42 MERZGEDICHTE IN MEMORIAM KURT SCHWITTERS (1994). Collectively they reveal the various generative methods and source texts Mac Low employed in composing his texts. From a formal point of view, 1954 marks a rupture in Mac Low's career, as conventional intentional strageties are displaced by non-intentional strategies. But from a political perspective there is a certain and problematic continuity. Mac Low has always been a political activist, a self-proclaimed pacifist-anarchist. This political stance is evident in the content of the verse written before 1954, as it is also in the Mac Low's activity as an editor of anarchist publication. After 1954 and Mac Low's increasing use of non-intentional strategies, the politcal stance is shifted to the poem's form and becomes actualized in the transaction between the text and the reader. As Bruce Campbell has explained, Mac Low has no desire "to be a dictator....Instead Mac Low wants to 'empower' the reader....The reader is not someone who simply gazes upon the work or arrives at a prefabricated meaning; the reader helps to make the meaning." In short, using non-intentional strategies allows Mac Low to alter radically the power relationship of conventional author / reader transactions. Mac Low's work, because of its experimental and difficult characteristics, has not received a strong general audience; it has been most enthusiastically read by poets broadly interested in some of the same poetic / aesthetic values Mac Low investigates in his texts. Nevertheless, Mac Low has been the recipient of several awards: two Creative Artists Public Service Program fellowships (1973-74 and 1976-77), a National Endowments for the Arts fellowship (1976), a Guggenheim Memorial fellowship (1985), a Fulbright fellowship (1986) and, more recently, The Fund for Poetry awards (1988-89 and 1991-92). Mac Low continues to reside in New York City with his wife Anne Tardos. SCOPE AND CONTENT The Jackson Mac Low Papers span the bulk of his career as a poet, composer and multimedia performance artist, combining extensive documentation of his literary production with record of his political activities and influence on other artists. The collection is largely comprised of materials from the late 1930s to 1995, although there are a few documents from earlier years. The collection is arranged in ten series: 1) NOTEBOOKS, 2) BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL, 3) CORRESPONDENCE, 4) WRITINGS, 5) WRITINGS OF OTHERS, 6) INTERVIEWS, 7) CONFERENCES, FESTIVALS AND RESIDENCIES, 8) PROGRAMS AND Register of the Jackson Mac Low MSS 0180 3 Papers POSTERS, 9) SUBJECT FILES and 10) ORIGINALS OF PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPIES. SERIES 1: NOTEBOOKS The notebooks (1948-1990) are arranged chronologically and contain drafts of poems, quotations from literature read by Mac Low and reflections made at poetry readings and other places. SERIES 2: BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL This series provides a chronological overview of Mac Low's artistic production and includes biographies of various lengths, bibliographies, resumes, and lists of readings, performances, recordings, and publications. Also included are photographs of Mac Low and his family, calendars from the 1970s and 1980s that document his daily activities and tax returns (1972-1988). SERIES 3: CORRESPONDENCE The CORRESPONDENCE series documents Mac Low's relationships with other writers, artists, editors, publishers, and scholars and the collaborative nature of many of his compositions. A lesser portion of the correspondence is from family, primarily Mac Low's parents, his children and his wives.