Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low was an influential American poet born in Chicago in 1922, known for his experimental and performance-oriented approach to poetry. He studied philosophy at the University of Chicago before pursuing further education at Brooklyn College, where he earned his B.A. in 1958. This educational background, coupled with his move to New York City, allowed him to engage in various creative roles, including editing and teaching. Mac Low's poetry is distinguished by its incorporation of randomness, music, and dance, reflecting his connections with the Language Poetry movement and performance poetry. Notably, he collaborated with composer John Cage and drew inspiration from the I Ching and anagrams, using innovative methods to create works often intended for live performance rather than print. His engagement with the Fluxus movement helped to establish his reputation, culminating in a legacy that continues to influence contemporary poetry. Mac Low passed away in 2004, leaving behind a diverse body of work that challenges traditional notions of poetic form and permanence.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Jackson Mac Low
Poet
- Born: September 12, 1922
- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
- Died: December 8, 2004
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
Jackson Mac Low was born in Chicago in 1922. He received an A.A. degree in 1941from the University of Chicago, where he studied philosophy. After he left the university, he worked at a variety of unrewarding jobs while writing in his spare time. He eventually resumed his education, attending Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he received a B.A. degree in 1958. That degree, along with his move to New York City, led Mac Low to find work as an editor, translator, and teacher. In 1962, Mac Low married Iris Lezak, with whom he had a son and a daughter and to whom he dedicated his 1970 work, Stanzas for Iris Lezak. The two divorced in 1978, and he married artist Anne Tardos in 1990.
Although he had published poems before the 1960’s, in the early years of that decade Mac Low began to create the poems for which he is best known: experimental work which often is intended for performance and draws on music and the rich possibilities of randomness. His poetry often makes use of dance as well as music, a dimension which interested him as part of the performance of his work. The composer John Cage contributed to some of Mac Low’s works. Although some of his poems appeared in print, they primarily were aimed at an audience that could see and hear them, thus connecting Mac Low with the Language Poetry movement and with the popularity of performance poetry.
As the very titles of many of his works suggest, Mac Low spent a career considering the effects of random chance on his poetry. For some work, Mac Low created packs of cards which included random directions for performance of his poems. Some works drew on directions from I Ching, the Confucian book of change, while others used anagrams as a formal device. Many of Mac Low’s works draw on the subjects of his reading at the time he composed them.
With such an aesthetic, it is not surprising that print often was irrelevant to Mac Low’s work, for it would suggest a permanence which he saw as conflicting with his artistic vision. Print might also present other difficulties, for some of his works run to hundreds of pages. In the early 1960’s, Mac Low’s association with Fluxus, an artists’ workshop whose participants included artist Yoko Ono, enabled the first European performance of his work. Mac Low died in 2004, leaving a substantial legacy of innovative work which marked new directions for American poetry.