At the end of the millennium, many would say - and I would
agree - that Jackson Mac Low was the most profoundly
innovative poet of the second half of the 20th century.
During the first thirty years of his writing, his poetry may have
seemed the most disconcerting or the most ridiculously premised of any
being done at the time. I think a fairly large number of people
don't find it as obscure today as audiences did, say, thirty years
ago, and a century hence readers may wonder why anyone
thought of it as “difficult” at all. Most of Jackson’s poetry relies
on two premises. The first is that to a greater or lesser degree, it
incorporates “systematic chance” processes. The second is that,
ideally, it is meant to be performed rather than simply read on
the page.
The nature of systematic chance procedures may cause some initial
confusion, though it leads to a particular type of clarity.
In theory, one aspect of chance processes relies on
mysticism and the surrendering of the absolute control of the
individual ego. As important as that may be, it’s just as
important to note how much Jackson’s poems produced by chance sound
specifically like him, John Cage’s sound like Cage and no one
else, those done by me sound like poems I’ve done in other
modes, etc. Without going into a lengthy discussion, it seems
simplest to say that such procedures allow a greater number of
resources to enter the poetry and to establish a greater degree of
collaboration and participation with the world than more
conventional methods. This can further vary with the initial
design of the poem, which allows for different kinds and
degrees of intention on the part of the poet.
The nature of cooperation or collaboration links quite naturally
with the second premise: that poems created this way have a
natural affinity (one might almost call it a desire or a need) to be
performed. When performances allow or call for multiple
readers, they extend the degree of collaboration or cooperation.
This can bring the additional performance skills of all
participants into the poems, and it can and should act to
stimulate and expand the abilities of those who take part in the
work. Most of Jackson’s poems should be considered as scores
rather than finished pieces, their possibilities for realization
extending toward infinity. Some scores call for the delivery of
sentences no more unusual than those you might find in a
newspaper. Others break words down to individual letters or
sounds so basic that letters don’t really define them. As a result
of long practice and broad range,
Jackson was consummate in his skills at vocalization. Whether he recited
what in other contexts would be plain prose or consonant phonemes cracked
to levels that even the standard notation of linguists can’t
capture, or whether he used a vowel or syllable as the starting point
to create and run something like a musical scale or whether he rapidly
and effortlessly combined all of the above, Jackson’s virtuosity was
fully comparable to that of vocalists in any musical mode you
could name, from rock to opera.
His stage presence moved in a different direction. From the first
performances I attended in the early 1970s through those I took
part in as late as 1976, he had let his hair grow extremely long,
and this combined with a whitening beard and his small stature
suggested a character like Merlin in the Arthurian legends.
Between the summer of 76 and the beginning of the next year,
he cut his hair fairly short and began shaving. As styles of
grooming changed, he kept from drawing too much attention to
his appearance - during the last years of his life, he tended to
dress and groom himself like a rather dapper (but not
ostentatious) business man. During performances he at times seemed
absent minded to the audience. Following him as a fellow
performer, you could see how intent he was on vocalization to
the exclusion of all else, and if you were a non-performing
member of the audience, you’d probably stop watching him and
concentrate on the patterns of sound and significance instead.
This is precisely where concentration belongs in most Mac Low
performances. Ambient sounds (from the audience, from the
street) found their way into performances, and I became more
acutely aware of these sounds when I was one of the
participants.
Jackson and I first began discussing publishing his work in 1974
or 75. After a couple possibilities that didn’t seem feasible, we
settled on the idea of doing a selection from his Gathas. We
spent over a year trying to decide which Gathas to include.
During the summer of 1976, when my then-companion Susan and I spent
several extended stays at his loft during our annual pilgrimage to the
east coast, Jackson and I decided we should do the complete work. At that
time it was about 180 pages long, most pages requiring two color printing.
Changing Appearance, The Werewolf Sequence and several other large
books done as commercial jobs gave me greater
confidence in my ability to produce a book of that size and complexity.
By this time I had started making elaborate book-objects, some made of
soap or human hair or mirrors or other unusual materials, some simply
employing large collections (approximately 4 inches thick) of blotter
sheets, chance generated collages created in the printing process, etc.
These included acoustic books made to be used as musical instruments in
performances. I made one of the first of these specifically to use in
performances of Jackson's Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Some books made
sounds so soft that they were intended to lower the volume of noise in an
environment rather than creating more noise. These fascinated Jackson. As
common as book objects are today, virtually no one else was doing anything
like them at the time. The difficulty of producing these books gave both
of us more confidence in publishing the complete Gathas, as a book,
as a piece of book art, and as a volume that could be used as much as
scores for public performance as for private reading. Our conversations
in the summer of ‘76 began a long process for Jackson of trying to
finalize the work.
Everyone who’s spent any time with Jackson has stories about
his fussbudgetry. The following is a favorite of mine. On this
occasion, we arrived at the loft just as Jackson’s children,
Clarinda and Mordechai-Mark, were leaving to stay with friends in the
country. The invitation for this trip had come up hurriedly, and
they had thrown together some clothes and other items in a
spontaneous and carefree spirit. The loft had a singular layout.
There was a room across from the elevator for the children,
which they graciously surrendered for Susan and me to sleep in
when we visited. A bit beyond this was Jackson’s piano, and
beyond that an area I called “Karnak,” a large, densely packed
bank of bookcases, filing cabinets and other storage devices that
seemed more like the dark and crowded Egyptian temple than
the courthouse not too far away whose columns earned it the
nickname “The Tombs.” The living room was located at the end
opposite the elevator. When approaching it by walking through
Karnak, you’d find a bathroom and a kitchenette on the left. To
the far right, Jackson kept trestles for audio recording
instruments and other devices used in sound poetry and
performances. Between these and the kitchenette were
mattresses on which Jackson and some of his women folk slept,
and where we spent most of our time talking when we visited.
The custom of the house was nudism. Before I met Susan, I
tended to disrobe in nudist environments, but did so
reluctantly, as is perhaps predictable among the sons of
ministers. Susan had a different approach. In nudist
environments, she removed her clothes except for her blouse.
This kept her from coming across as hostile to those who went
without clothing, but still preserved two basic forms of modesty.
The first being the simple modesty of not wanting to be seen; the
second suggesting that she wouldn't mind joining the others but was
too shy to do so, and seemed to be apologizing for it. I was
happy to follow her lead in this. In mid summer in Lower
Manhattan, the heat could be particularly unpleasant, and this
degree of dress was much more comfortable than remaining
fully clothed. Taking off shoes and socks was a particular relief.
The ambiance of the loft had a sincere informality which was
pleasant to us. This became all the more clear by its opposite in
the loft of another friend’s companion. Photos of this loft had
been featured in a glossy magazine, and the proprietress was so fussy
about the appearance of the loft that she obsessed about it constantly,
even insisting that when she poured us cups of coffee and
glasses of wine that we drink them in the kitchen without
putting them down on any surface. Thus to drink something, we
had to get up from the coffee table, go into the kitchen, drink
quickly over the sink, then move back to the faux-casual living
room. Although she wouldn’t have understood it at the time, her
attitude was sewing the seeds of destruction for SoHo as a place
for artists to live and work together.
The living room of Jackson’s loft may have been disheveled
before Clarinda and Mordechai prepared to leave, but was a
complete mess afterward, with what seemed to be perhaps an
inch of rubble surrounding the mattresses in the living room.
This was not its constant condition - at times, Jackson could
keep it tidy. We talked for a while, went out for supper, visited
some other friends in SoHo and the Bowery, and returned to the loft.
During the conversation there I shifted positions on one of the
mattresses and put the sole of my foot squarely down into the
rubble. Mordechai had cut the bottom of a soft drink bottle off
for a project he had been working on, and, without being able to
see it, I planted my bare foot directly on the jagged glass. This
produced a bloody circular cut on the bottom of my foot. Nature
designed our feet with the same practicality as other parts of the
body. The soles have a lot of capillaries, which aid in keeping
the flesh nourished while walking and running. It also keeps the
passages connected in such a way as to bleed enough to clean
themselves out, but not enough to cause serious blood loss or
other problems. Had the bottoms of our feet been more
vulnerable, we wouldn’t have lasted long enough to invent
shoes. I thought the situation was funny, and made some jokes
about it as I went into the bathroom to wash off my foot and put a
towel around it. The situation upset Jackson. He called from the
living room, giving me instructions on how to wash the foot,
where antiseptics and bandages could be found, etc. Trying to
find the items he mentioned took a while, and his instructions
became more shrill. Finally, he came into the bathroom, placed
my foot in the sink and began scrubbing it himself. Then pouring
rubbing alcohol and peroxide over the cut. Then rewashing it.
And continuing to fuss with other first aid measures for perhaps
half an hour to forty five minutes. The real danger in this
situation was not the cut, but the possibility of losing our
balance and perhaps breaking limbs. Once he had fussed enough,
we returned to the living room and resumed our
conversation. We spent a good deal of the next day walking or
standing, and the cut did no more than itch a bit, showing how
minor the damage had been. This seems a perfect Jackson
fussing story because it reveals not only his fidgetyness, but also
his generosity, his concern for other people’s well-being, his
hospitality, and his humility. It’s difficult to imagine anyone
else of his artistic rank doing something like this - and
impossible to conceive of anyone lower on the status ladder
even thinking about it - particularly in the ferociously competitive
environment of Lower Manhattan at that time.
Going through my correspondence with Jackson as I write this, there are
plenty of oddities to muse on. What comes through most clearly is his
endless generosity, his kindness, and the quality of the associative
processes in his longer letters. This latter dimension could use an
essay of its own. His uneasiness and frustration in trying to get his
FBI files via the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, includes
the reminiscences of his political activism as a student. That's part
of his discourse that nearly everyone who's spent any time with him
remarks upon. The webs that link his own concerns, however, with
mini-discourses on Burke and Common Law, on the problems so-and-so
is having keeping his rent controlled apartment, the reading he went to
last night, a bit of musing on the pronunciation of a word that's about
to pass out of common usage, his uneasiness about someone who disappeared
years ago, his dissatisfaction with Murray Rotbard's shifting individual
Anarchism into a firmer capitalist base, contemplation of the paper covered
wires used to close plastic bags, reminiscences of a former love affair,
complaints about problems associated with zoning ordinances in his
neighborhood, the quotation of lines of Sappho in Greek with
commentary on metrics borrowed by Swinburn, the ice-cream making device the
kids were using, his anxieties about the logistics of an upcoming trip to a
performance, concepts of non-ego in Chan and Theravada classic texts, and
so on and on, suggest the thought processes of a poet who could comprehend
a world too large for older poetic methods, and whose experimentation
strove for a type of newness that included everyone,
not simply one that relied on the pleasures of invention. Part of his
fidgetry was inextricably linked with three important dimensions of his
art: his extreme attention to detail, his exquisite sensitivity to
anything that happened to be going on around him, and his desire to
include every bit of the world's texture in whatever he did. If this
included fidgeting with worry beads and washing his disciples' feet,
that may have, in the first instance, been a necessary part of the
art; and in the second, a part of his profound humanity.
Jackson was magnificent to perform with, once a performance
had begun, and conversation with him was equally delightful.
His range of knowledge and insight contributed considerably to
this. He often enough went into extended monologues. I’m not
averse to such modes myself, and though Jackson's attention
sometimes seemed to drift when I engaged in them, he often enough
referred to something I said in another conversation days or
even months later. Despite giving the impression of being
absent-minded or distracted, he was a good listener as well as a
good talker. Jackson’s piano playing added to the pleasantness
of the loft. His musical interests were as eclectic as his
conversations, and he as often as not played work by composers
such as Massanet and Saint-Saëns - not the sort of thing
you’d expect in this part of American Bohemia. In addition to
our trips to New York, Jackson got to the midwest at least once
a year for over a decade, initially at the invitation of Michel
Benamou and Jerry Rothenberg, later for performances I
arranged at Woodland Pattern and other venues. After 1976, this
invariably included discussions of the Gathas.
However exhilarating performances might be, the preparation for them
could be difficult. On one occasion, I spent an afternoon with
him setting up speakers and microphones. We then went out for
supper. When we came back, half an hour or so before the time
when the performance was supposed to start, we found that the
university’s audio-visual department had taken all the
equipment out of the room and replaced it with other amps,
mikes, speakers, etc. Jackson was exceedingly distressed by this
for a few moments, but then apparently forgot about it. At a solo
performance, he gave me a tape recorder and some tape and told
me to turn the tape over when it ran out, and to put another one
in if both sides were filled. When the first side came to an end, I
flipped it over and pressed the record button. Jackson, however,
eyeing me and the machine nervously, wasn’t sure I’d done this
right and stopped in the midst of a stream of abstract sounds,
came off the stage, took the recorder, looked through the plastic
pane covering the tape, and, seeing that the gears were indeed
turning, returned to the stage and resumed his performance.
A number of Jackson’s friends joked about the impossibility of getting
the ms. for the Gathas out of his loft. While he fussed over the
copy, I did a number of small projects. Perhaps the most important of
these was 54th Light Poem: For Ian Tyson, which I
published in 1978. An important feature of these smaller works
is that completing them usually meant Jackson would perform
them the next time I saw him, and if the piece was for multiple
voices, I might get to participate. In 1979, I achieved what a
number of people had considered impossible: I got the
Gathas out of Jackson’s loft and into my studio.
Jackson wasn’t satisfied with the first half dozen pages I printed,
claiming the black letters didn’t correctly register with the blue
grids in which they fit. The problem here was not in the
printing, but an optical illusion caused by the difference in paper
and the difference between the ink that comes on pre-printed
paper, the ink that comes from pens, and the ink that an offset
press lays down when reproducing pages that have aged. Had
Jackson not hallucinated at this point, I would have been able to
get the book done in at most six months.
I wasn’t sure how to proceed from here. Perhaps a different
stock would help. In the midst of deliberations, I began a new
love affair. Jackson came for a performance while this was still in
its first flushes. At this time, the impossible triumph undid itself:
Jackson insisted on taking the copy back to New York with him.
Perhaps if I hadn’t been so enthralled with the new lady, I would
have been able to devise some means of hanging on to the ms,
but whatever the case, it left my studio. In the next three years I
had two accidents which temporarily incapacitated me. The first
occurred on the loading dock of a bindery and left me with a
ruptured disk in my spine. A year and a half later, I got my right
index finger caught in the gears of my press. Both accidents
required a bit of recovery time, though not enough to prevent
doing the Gathas. Before both these incidents, Jackson
said he would get the copy back to me, but decided not to after
each mishap. In 1982, I decided that doing his Is That Wool
Hat My Hat? as a more elaborate score than the copy he
had sent me might make a beautiful book, an eminently useful
score, and might just persuade him to get the Gathas
copy back to me so I could resume work on it. Printing
Wool Hat in four colors made it labor intensive, and
easier for performers to use.
In 1984, my manic-depressive disorder moved into a period of full collapse
- assisted, predictably, by the excessive dosage and rapid switching of
psychiatric drugs psychiatrists push on people at precisely the wrong
times. I attempted to end my life on December 1 of that year. The triggers
for this probably included going for several years at a ferociously
intense and relentless level of creativity. After about six months
of physical recovery, I spent most of the next four years in the
country, keeping only minimal contact with poets. Just before
his surgery in 1988, bpNichol told me in a telephone
conversation that I’d had enough of a vacation, enough time to
recover, and that I should resume work, bringing my new
companion and her children into the process with me: even if
they weren't particularly interested in this, he felt sure they would
become so given a little time and exposure. He insisted that I should
continue a number of projects about which he was enthusiastic if he
did not make it through the surgery. He did not make it.
I took his admonition as a sign that I should
indeed return to writing, publishing, and the other activities that
I had put aside.
Publishing proved particularly difficult,
however, since I no longer had presses with which to print
books. I managed to buy a good quality photocopier with
provisions for color cartridges. I had previously tried to
convince some of the people who do exquisite letter press
editions to pull proofs on hard surfaced stock without too much
punch or dwell so that I could make offset editions of their
books, enlarging the audience not only for the work published
but also showing just how good traditional typography could be
to people who hadn’t seen much of it. I had managed to do this
with Walter Tisdale’s edition of Ted Enslin’s The Weather
Within. Charles Alexander decided he would like to work
with me in this way. We made arrangements for me to reprint
two books by Paul Metcalf, Golden Delicious and
Firebird, and Jackson’s French Sonnets from
his type.
Anne Tardos did computer-based cover and endpaper graphics for the new
edition of French Sonnets. We thus had a Rube Goldberg set
of production procedures, ranging from type such as Aldus
Manutius might have set 500 years earlier to Anne’s computer
images printed by me using nothing but a photocopier. This reminds me
of the odd combinations of methods from the mimeo days.
French Sonnets is less a score than most of Jackson’s
work. It is an utterly delightful read, though, silent or aloud.
And its beaming joviality seemed a good note on which to end
my printing of books by Jackson on paper. After this, I
published several of his works on the web - perhaps we could
see French Sonnets as a transition from doing original
work to anthologizing.
I wasn’t able to get the Gathas done, and at this point
feel sure I never will. Given the expense of color printing,
there’s a good chance the complete collection will never see
print. Looking back over what is now just a few months under 40 years
of publishing, not being able to do this book remains my biggest
regret.
Printing as often as not had something like a
party element to it. But this should not obscure the fact that it is
always hard work and has multitudinous frustrations and
agonies associated with it. The most common physical problems
for me came in the form of respiratory pain from working in an
unventilated basement and getting rashes and burns from press
chemicals. Occasionally, an alternative publisher may sustain
significant wounds to the back, and at the time I started printing,
it was unusual to find a print shop that didn’t have at least one
middle-aged employee with one or more missing fingers. I came within an
ace of joining that fraternity. Although in rare instances you might
bring in money, alternative publishing is a money hemorrhaging enterprise,
in which breaking even does not include paying yourself for your
labor, just covering costs of materials. No matter how good a job you do,
there’s always some nagging little thing that will bother you about
every book you produce, and these little heartaches resume
every time you look at the book for decades to come. You don’t
get strokes from reviewers and seldomly from anyone else -
though you do get blamed for anything that goes wrong. These
are just some of the blood, sweat, and tears that readers never
see. Nor should they.
Yet no matter how many problems I’ve run
into, the books I’ve done have all had their satisfactions.
They’ve been more than worth the effort, even when the work
has been most frustrating.
My greatest unhappiness in publishing has come not from accidents,
wounds, mistakes, difficulties - even such parts of an artist's life as
silly as incidents in which you get your foot cut or as dramatic as
manic depressive disorder and attempts at suicide. In the work I
have done in print and on the web, those I have not been able to do
are the ones that really hurt. The early death of friends is not
specific to publishers, but part of everybody's life. That the
Gathas is absent from this retrospective expresses my greatest
regret as a publisher.
That, however,
doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a great time with the titles
shown here.
I wrote the first draft of this essay as part of another one toward
the end of 2003. The essay was about four poets, and set up as a sonata.
In that instance, it was paired with the first draft of my notes on Toby
Olson. The Toby section was an alegro suggesting the pleasantness of
the process. Jackson's section was a complex adagio, including scherzi but
generally meditating on the difficulties and
regrets involved in publishing books. I revised it near the end of 2004 for
my first attempt at this retrospective, several days after Jackson's death.
Now, at the beginning of 2006, I have had a year to pretend I'll get used
to Jackson's absence. Even though our communication had been by letter and
telephone during the last decade and a half of his life, it seemed there'd
be a time when I'd get back to Lower Manhattan and resume conversations
from a another era. The progress of this article suggests how much of a
Jackson-like fussbudget I've become myself.
I assume appreciations from poets and other artists will be forthcoming in the
following years. I did a memorial suite of visual poems shortly after Jackson's
death and incorporated them into a project Mail Artist Reid Wood and I
have been developing for the last twelve years. I wrote an extensive
essay for Jackson's 75th birthday, and imagine I will continue to write
about him as long as I continue writing crit.
As was the case when I was writing the first version of this essay, it's
easy enough for me to recall in acoustic memory performances of The
Pronouns and Stanzas for Iris Lezak. It's also easy to
remember Jackson, the most innovative poet in the English speaking world,
playing lush, effulgent, and delightfully out of fashion music on his piano
in his loft on the edge of SoHo, during its time as Planet Earth's
artistic center.
Whatever the losses along the way may be, Jackson was
the great poet of fullness, of infinite possibility, for our time, and
the contrast between what I published and what I wanted to publish
suggests how much publishers will have to do in the future to adequately
make available the poetry of their own time. I hope it suggests how
completely worth it all the blood, sweat, tears - and even major
losses - can be.
