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.

Susan Landers, Franklinstein

In the beginning of this writing I thought: I must make alive the feeling of importance these little lost gentle things hold, existence being not very strong in them.

            Some connections to place are patronizing.

At the Small Press Distribution website, Brooklyn poet Susan Landers’ remarkable Franklinstein (New York NY: Roof Books, 2016), subtitled “Or, the making of a modern neighborhood,” is described as a “hybrid genre collection of poetry and prose [that] tells the story of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Germantown—an historic, beloved place, wrestling with legacies of colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Drawing from interviews, historical research, and two divergent but quintessential American texts (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans), Landers’ Franklinstein is a monster readers have not encountered before.” Franklinstein certainly riffs off Franklin and Stein, as well as the idea of the collage-creation (creating new life out of dead parts), but, as she responds in an interview conducted by Christopher Schaeffer, posted in issue 7 of the online TINGE Magazine (spring 2014): “To call this project ‘collage’ is probably a misnomer. While the project had started out as a mash-up, at this stage in my writing, Franklin and Stein operate more as muses. Searching for language in their texts enables me to get fresh perspective and enter the poems from new angles. And because writing is difficult and I can get stymied by the enormity of Germantown’s history or the challenge of writing autobiographically, turning to these texts is a kind of release valve when writing, like letting the steam out of the radiator.”

At the beginning of this writing I was reading. Reading two books I had never read before: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Making of Americans. And as I was reading, I thought: I should make a new book. A new book from pieces. A new book using only Ben’s words and Gertrude’s. And so I did that. For months. Cutting and pasting little pieces. To make a monster. And it was so boring.

                        It was so boring, my dead thing of parts.

Then the church I grew up in closed. The church where my mother and father were married. The church where they baptized their babies. A church in Philadelphia in the neighborhood where I grew up. A kind of rundown place. A place of row homes and vacant and schist.

And when I went there to see that place – the place that was with me from my very beginning – I thought, this will breathe life into my pieces. This will be the soul of my parts. I thought: if I could write the story of this place and its beginnings, this writing would be the right thing, a kind of living.

                                                This is where my writing began.

At the beginning of this writing, historian David Young told me there is Germantown the place – a place of demographics, statistics, boundaries – and Germantown the constructed historical place – what people have chosen to save and memorialize, ignore or forget – and how some of those who talk about its history are plagued by nostalgia, by notions of an idealized past that never existed. He warned me that strong personal connections to this place can intensify a sense of decline, and that this melancholy does little to interpret the past in ways that do justice to the neighborhood as it exists today.

This is where my writing began: in a church I felt compelled to visit before it closed, before it became another vacant, beautiful building in a neighborhood of vacant, beautiful buildings. At the beginning of this writing, I was participating in behavior long practiced in Germantown – that of white people mourning what was. (“IT WAS MY DESIGN TO EXPLAIN (PART 1)”)

As Wikipedia informs: “Germantown is an area in Northwest Philadelphia. Founded by German Quaker and Mennonite families in 1683 as an independent borough, it was absorbed into Philadelphia in 1854. The area, which is about six miles northwest from the city center, now consists of two neighborhoods: ‘Germantown’ and ‘East Germantown’. Germantown has played a significant role in American history; it was the birthplace of the American antislavery movement, the site of a Revolutionary War battle, the temporary residence of George Washington, the location of the first bank of the United States, and the residence of many notable politicians, scholars, artists, and social activists.” The collage-elements in Landers’ Franklinstein are an intriguing and incredibly powerful blend of what American poets Susan Howe and Juliana Spahr have also long done in their own work, as Landers utilizes both personal history and prior knowledge against research to attempt a portrait of a neighbourhood that has gone through numerous shifts and iterations both before and since her time there. Structured in sections that fragment and fractal, she blends prose with the lyric with the archive, setting research beside memory, and contemporary photos alongside scanned archival documents and testimonials by residents past and present. This is the sort of book that others, including myself, attempting to capture and comprehend geography through writing might wish they’d written. Much of the strength of the book, apart from the obvious clear force of her writing, is in how personal she allows it to be, without being entangled or hindered through a sentimental lens. Combined with her awareness of larger communities, Franklinstein is not simply about her and hers, but a larger context of geographic and cultural spaces, shifting perspectives, each utilized to reach an impossibly complex portrait, as she writes: “To come closer // to come to see // this writing must meander.”

This is a poem about pulping bibles to make bullets for a revolution – a bladder full of pokeberry juice – a portrait drawn in blood – about how impossible it was to get the right kind of mortgage – and how savage the lenders were in foreclosing – a postcard of a cemetery with the words still living scrawled across the front.

This is a poem about Sydney telling me we can get there wherever there is to have a decent life where the poetry happens – a poem about John and his bowl full of prayers – and Vashti who gets asked why she doesn’t live in Mt. Airy – and Rachael who says places like this are hard to navigate, all tied up with romance and symbolism and baggage – a poem about a poem about Kevon who gave me a hug – and Bernard who gave me a ride – and that guy who wanted to give me one of his minutes since I didn’t have one – and Tiptoe who called me a vampire.

These are the makings of an autobiography of America. (“THIS WAS THEN THE WAY I WAS FILLED FULL OF IT AFTER LOOKING”)

Literary Mothers : rob mclennan on Elizabeth Smart

The website Literary Mothers was kind enough to re-post my piece on the late Ottawa writer Elizabeth Smart on their fantastic site recently. Thanks so much! Originally posted at Open Book: Ontario, I actually composed the piece with them in mind, a magnificent website that has posted a whole slew of worthy material of writers on their "literary mothers," including Rachel Zucker on Alice Notley (and other mothers), Kip Wilson on Banana Yoshimoto, Dorothea Lasky on Many Literary Mothers, A Violin Case, And A Woman on the Subway, Elliott Holt on Alice Munro, Amy Lawless on Elizabeth Bishop, Deb Olin Unferth on Gertrude Stein, Carrie Murphy on Rachel Zucker, Jessica Smith on Susan Howe and Lily Hoang on Many Mothers, But Especially Anne Carson among many, many others. If you haven't had a chance to read any of their posts, you should very much do so. And they even take submissions!

Although I did find it curious that one of the comments under the piece at Open Book suggested that Smart wasn't an obvious influence on my literary work. Hasn't anyone read either of my novels...?

Ongoing notes: the dusie kollektiv,

Between the mail strike, my massive move, and the slow trickle of whatever chapbooks remain of the ninety-some to eventually appear, it has been a while since I've gone through another small stack of dusie chapbooks. 

Here are three of the most recent to appear, in one of my various mailboxes over the past few weeks.

Portland, OR: Jared Hayes' into the furrows (2011) describes itself as “an experimental collage,” merging texts by Paul Celan and Hélène Cixous, and “structures: by Jacques Lacan, John Cage, Alice Notley and Louis Zukofsky.

(I will begin with) its

youngest leaf (writing changes languages)

from its crumb (you will

have recognized it) probe for

(the line that makes them

vibrate) into the furrows (perhaps

you were going) the roof

over us (I write) there

(in addition to this) wrote

(how could I not be)

According to a bio online, Hayes previously particiated in dusie with a “chapbook homage to Ted Berrigan,” his RecollecTed (2006), suggestion an ongoing relationship with recombinating texts by established wrters, and I would be interested in seeing, perhaps, Hayes' work in a larger context, whether a larger project or some kind of poetic statement by the author. The structure is interesting, a variation of which has also been worked by a number of other writers including Margaret Christakos, Gregory Betts and Pearl Pirie, but I would like to see something more.

(there to the) astralflute from

(otherwise) fire the deep (beneath

this book had lived) remembrance

too (I could imagine) blue

black memory (I could imagine)

past start throw-dives (the commonplace)

a delusion (I escape myself

death) an unnamed up which

(back to life) dredge up

after (I am telling you)

Palo Alto, CA: Between Palo Alto, California and Bloomington, Indiana come Bronwen Tate and Ming Holden's the loss letters (2011), a call-and-response collaboration, responding to forms, other writers, each other and their daily situations. As the colophon writes, “These poems were written and emailed (mostly in Palo Alto, California and Bloomington, Indiana) on the dates that accompany them in compliance (mostly) with the following guidelines: Follow the order of forms. Reply within 48 hours. No non-poem communication. The poem is the message.”

Pantoum of Waiting for a Heartbeat [BT. 11.04.10]

There's nothing I can do

and I am doing it.

I eat brown rice,

pretend to sip my wine.

And I am doing it,

trying not to count days.

Pretend to sip my wine,

walk three miles each morning.

Trying not to count days,

I still think five weeks tomorrow.

Walk three miles each morning,

write the dissertation.

I still think five weeks tomorrow.

I eat brown rice,

write the dissertation.

There's nothing I can do.

There is some magnificent interplay between the poems, each piece taking a lead from the one before, two poets engaged in a real conversation that allows space for sestinas, pantoums, ghazals, sonnets and villanelles, and Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Orlando and Buddha. Not every piece might entirely work, but the highlights make the entire journey worthwhile, and this small publication a compelling sequence of correspondence between two poets.

I am always wary of presuming overtly what is merely suggested, as far as the lives of the authors are concerned. There is a loss here, losses writ about, but unclear where the poems begin and the biographies end, especially when Tate's biography ends with the line, “If you miscarry or have miscarried and walk to talk to someone, you can email her at dormiveglia@gmail.com.”

Sonnet for You [MH. 1.3.11]

I wonder who it is that listens in

When skies inside our skulls fill up with rain.

Thudding to the ground, a severed fin,

A rosebud falls before it blooms again.

Who is it that would give us wings, then clip them?

By accident or malice, it still burns.

Torn out of us by someone who would rip them,

Our dreams take form then drop like stones by turns.

Sister, you need not have strength, faith, or hope.

To breathe is all I ask of you tonight.

You can lie still while thoughts of velvet rope

Binds you to the bed of nothing right.

But as you have for me, know that I'm listening.

That's the orb remaining, certain, glistening.

Berkeley CA: There is something magnificent about the play in Catherine Meng's long poem, I'M NOT WRITING PURE WAR THIS IS A GROCERY LIST (2011), writing across the page in a way that is difficult to replicate in such a post, writing: “the company name / a shore / a shoe a shoehorn / an octopus / exterior filtered through our liver / our lungs / our hung dog faces / our rag rugs / our place mats / our places.”

There are too few poets who really understand how to use space across the page, or how to work a political poem without ranting or becoming pedantic, but Meng manages to be compelling on both fronts, wrapping her poem across the full page in a way that probably sounds magnificent at a reading, as she writes: “he put the whole world / in his mouth / not long after / poetry left the page / where it was to begin / not either/or / but and/or / I put the whole world / in my mouth & / coughitbackup.”