The Complete Light Poems

Overview

Jackson Mac Low’s Complete Light Poems appear exactly ten years after the poet’s death. The first 22 Light Poems were published by Black Sparrow Press in 1968. In the ensuing 20 years, Jackson wrote 38 more Light Poems, ending with the “60th Light Poem: In Memoriam Robert Duncan, 8–9 October 1988.” The Light Poems, begun in 1962, are unique to Mac Low’s body of work in that they were written intermittently, over a period of 26 years.I have often wondered where selfreferential writing ends and objective observation begins. Endearingly, Mac Low continually invites us into the time and place of his writing. We are, as it were, being let in from the cold: “Just me & the cats & and the plants I just took a shower it’s not quite 100 degrees here.” From the Preface by Anne Tardos

Author Biography

Poet, performance artist, and composer Jackson Mac Low was born in Chicago and began studying music as a child. After completing coursework at the University of Chicago, he moved to New York City, where he earned a BA in Greek at Brooklyn College. His early work as an etymologist and reference book contributor laid the foundation for his fascination with the possibilities found in units of sound and sense. Influenced by Gertrude Stein and Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as by his studies in Buddhism and philosophy, Mac Low frequently composed poems as scripts for performance that rely on the mechanisms of chance rather than the conventions of syntax or intention. His work explores the intersections of language, structure, and music by systematically shuffling and silencing found and fragmented text. In an interview with Jacket magazine, Mac Low discussed his aim as a writer “to let what’s there be; especially letting words, linguistic units, be, not making them carry a burden of my thoughts, my feelings, or whatever.” Mac Low’s frequent collaborations included partnerships with composer John Cage and with his wife, the poet, artist, and composer Anne Tardos. A founding member of the avantgarde group Fluxus, whose work he and coeditor La Monte Young presented in An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963), Mac Low served as an influential figure in the Language poetry movement. Mac Low published more than two dozen volumes of poetry, including 20 Forties (1999), Twenties: 100 Poems (01/01/1991), and Representative Works 1938–1985 (1986), as well as Two Plays: Verdurous Sanguinaria and The Marrying Maiden (1999) and the audio recording Open Secrets (1993). Mac Low received the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Fund for Poetry, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He taught at many schools, including New York University and the Mannes School of Music. He died in New York City after complications from a stroke. A selection of his papers is stored in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.