Jackson Mac Low, The Complete Stein Poems 1998-2003, ed. Michael O’Driscoll

 

            Indeed, as Mac Low was at pains to emphasize time and again in the last decades of his life, procedural operations are anything but a matter of chance:

In the 1960s, when I first devised and utilized deterministic methods, I thought that the methods that I know realize are deterministic were kinds of chance operations. It was only in the early 90s that I realized that such methods are basically different from chance operations. The principal difference is that if one employs a deterministic text-selection method correctly, using the same source text and seed text and making no mistakes, the method’s output will always be exactly the same. Chance operations produce a different output each time they are utilized. Deterministic methods do not involve what could rightly be called “chance,” or as many artists have termed it, “objective hazard.”

The Tucson lecture, which I’ve cited here and throughout my introduction, and which follows as a further introduction to this volume, is an important example of Mac Low’s extended attempts to nuance the historical record of his role as the champion of chance operations. As I’ve documented elsewhere, from about 1980 onward Mac Low repeatedly sought to correct the overemphasis on chance and what he no longer regarded as the “egoless” composition of purportedly nonintentional works. This effort extended, importantly, to his own central statements on the allied work of John Cage, including the essay “Cage’s Writing up to the Late 1980s,” which Mac Low revised no fewer than five times over a period of fifteen years with an increasing emphasis that accentuates his own investments in this piece. The central point of Mac Low’s 2001 version of the essay is that while Cage’s mesostic methods are nonintentional and deterministic, the textual selections and aesthetic judgments that precede and follow the mesostic procedure are matters of choice. But this reluctance to subordinate fully his own creative impulses to procedural or chance determinants was also very much in keeping with his regular refusal of the label “experimental poet.” For Mac Low, the use of deterministic procedural methods was not, as is so often supposed, a matter of experimentation. (Michael O’Driscoll, ““This shining makes revision of a string more strange”: An Introduction to Jackson Mac Low’s The Complete Stein Poems”)

I’m impressed by the heft, at nearly six hundred pages, of the newly-published collection The Complete Stein Poems 1998-2003 by Jackson Mac Low, edited by Michael O’Driscoll, with a foreword by Anne Tardos (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2025). The Complete Stein Poems assembles Mac Low’s final, great procedural work together for the first time, meticulously compiled and critically articulated by critic Michael O’Driscoll, a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In case you aren’t aware, American poet, performer, composer and visual artist Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004), as the back cover of this particular volume offers, “was a leading member of the Fluxus group, an innovator of procedural poetics and liminal compositional forms, and a progenitor of the Language Poets and other conceptual artists.”

The poems that make up The Complete Stein Poems was composed, as editor O’Driscoll writes in his introduction, across more than half a decade through a precise formal procedure “[…] that Mac Low himself had invented in 1963 in order to generate poetic material determined by algorithmic rules. This latest version of the program, crated in 1994 at Mac Low’s request, was a fifth generation of the original 1989 DIASTEXT code, now revised to handle larger inputs. The algorithm, following Mac Low’s procedure, sequentially drew words from the source text that correspond to the placement of letters in the seed text. The placement of letters in the first word of the seed, ‘l-i-t-t-l-e’ in this case, resulted in the first line of the output: ‘Little lIngering faTher titTle reguLar simplE.’ Having completed a full cycle of testing the source text against the seed text, the program terminated its output at thirty-five lines. Saving the results to his hard drive, now in the wee hours of the morning of April 28, Mac Low would go on to massage the raw output the following day, excising and altering redundant words, introducing capitals, periods, and line spaces to give the poem its desired form, titling the result from the initial and concluding words of the poem, and recording the whole process and the interventions he’d made into a summary ‘makingways’ note along with the location and date that concludes the poem.” The source text that O’Driscoll refers to Mac Low working from for this project were A Stein Reader, edited with an introduction by Ulla E. Dydo (Northwestern University Press, 1993) and “a corrected version” of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), and the collision of unexpected words against each other are exactly the point of this project, pushing language into and against itself, twisting the possibilities of sound and meaning through a highly formal and precise procedure. As the piece “One Completely,’ cited as “(Stein 16),” a  poem “derived from a source passage in Stein’s “Orta or One Dancing” begins: “one / one / one who. // This who them son / not came something / was her / her come / come her that.” The Complete Stein Poems is certainly a precursor to multiple, possibly hundreds, of other procedural works, whether Christian Bök’s infamous and award-winning Eunoia (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2001) or Derek Beaulieu’s “The Newspaper,” as well as more recent work by Ottawa poet Grant Wilkins.

Given contemporary conversations and concerns around creativity and AI, one certainly wouldn’t confuse this as a work done by machine, as the human hand still remains central to Mac Low’s creation, from the final edits and touches to the development of the initial process. One can read through the poems without notation, or move deeply through the precise detail of how Mac Low moved from source material to where each piece landed, through Mac Low’s hand. Or the first poem, “Little Beginning,” a piece cited “New York: 27-28 April 1998; 23 March, 29 April 2002” that offers the note: “Derived from a page (and preceding line) of Gertrude Stein’s ‘A Long Gay Book’ (A Stein Reader, edited by Ulla E. Dydo, last line of 240 through 241—determined by a logarithm table) via Charles O Hartman’s program DIASTEX5, his latest automation of one of my diastic procedures developed in 1963, using the 1^st paragraph of the source as seed, and subsequent editing: some excisions of words, changes of word order within lines; and changes and additions of capitals, periods, and spaces.” As the first half of that piece reads:

Little lingering father little regular simple.

 

Little long length there louder happening deepening.

Beginning and little way singing neat cooked.

Difference certain length time light much lighting. 

Description certain choosing is the piece.

Pleasant the deranged rhubarb pudding permitted stay.

Sit sing laugh soiling not lingering sing.

Singing difference conclude long so to mention.

Length is stay sit sing laugh soiling beginning.

Singing and any and which the way singing has higher.

Is material long very fried the pears when abuse. 

And say filled makes afternoon with children there.

It is.