Jackson Mac Low

Jackson Mac Low (born September 12, 1922, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died December 8, 2004, New York, New York) was an American poet, composer, and performance artist known for his “chance method” style of poetry writing.

From 1939 to 1943 Jackson Mac Low attended the University of Chicago, where he studied philosophy, poetics, and literature. He graduated with an Associate of Arts degree and moved to New York City, where he would reside for the rest of his life. During his early years there, Mac Low took a variety of jobs, including factory worker, tutor, music teacher, and messenger. In 1955 he returned to school in order to improve his job prospects. He enrolled in Brooklyn College to study classical languages and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Greek (1958).

Throughout the 1950s, Mac Low associated with the American experimentalist movement and the New American Poetry movement. His poetry explored the creation and performance of work through the “chance method”—a process that generates a random assortment of words and that incorporates lines from previously published texts. Through that method, Mac Low also played with sound and included rhythmic silences. He used the chance method for the first time when he wrote 5 biblical poems (1954–55). The poems in that series were derived from a haphazard collection of lines from the Hebrew scriptures and included slashes to represent rhythmic silences. The numbers of words and silences per line were determined by the throw of a die. At the beginning of the text, Mac Low included a set of instructions for how to read the poems.

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During the early 1960s, Mac Low began to receive acclaim for his poetry and recognition for walking a line between poetry and performance. His first great success came with the performance by the Living Theatre of his play The Marrying Maiden (1960), which had a script derived from lines of Yijing, an ancient Chinese work that was one of the Five Classics of Confucianism, and a score by experimentalist composer John Cage. Mac Low regularly participated in Happenings, such as a performance of his work Verdurous Sanguinaria in 1961 at the home of Yoko Ono. The words of that play were sourced from 26 different dictionaries. In 1963, he copublished (with composer La Monte Young) An Anthology of Chance Operations…, which became a fundamental resource for the Fluxus art movement, of which Mac Low was a founding member. Mac Low wrote prolifically; his works were performed regularly, and in the 1960s members of Fluxus took some of his works to the stages of Europe. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Mac Low taught English composition at New York University.

Mac Low published some 27 books of poetry and plays as well as a recording on compact disc, Open Secrets (1993), with performances by Mac Low, Anne Tardos, and a group of instrumentalists. Most of his later work was created in collaboration with Tardos, a visual and performance artist whom he married in 1990. In 1999 he received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.