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| Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works
ISBN: 9780520933293
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Experimental poetry; Performance art -- Texts;
In her enlightening forward to this newest gathering of avant-garde poet Mac Low's work, Tardos makes the case that Mac Low (1922-2004) had an over-arching interest throughout his career in creating "things of beauty," a bombshell of a statement considering Mac Low's oeuvre, made up in large part of Zen-inspired "chance" experiments and ungainly language clusters like "Ugolino, / re oN rlin / Dysentery / Eille eZzato paRently." Mac Low's work has always been interesting, but beautiful? This collection, which follows two previous selections, does the best job to date in providing a window into Mac Low's unique perspective on what constitutes poetic beauty, showcasing a wide range of his poetry, from earnest political juvenilia to concrete-poetic text experiments, and featuring the previously less represented work Mac Low did in his last 20 years. Mac Low's more personal, less overtly process-generated, lyrics reveal the modernist and Romantic roots of Mac Low's sensibility. "No. no. no. Hear! The between," he wrote in 1946 in "Hear I here," laying out his lifetime preoccupation with "betweenness." Mac Low continued to listen dutifully until his death. This book provides a rewarding testament to his ability to transcribe what he heard. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Mac Low Jackson :
Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) was a poet, composer, painter, and multimedia performance artist. He is the author of more than twenty-five books including Doings (2005), Pieces o' Six (1993), and Twenties (1992). Anne Tardos is a poet, performer, visual artist, and composer. She is the author of many books including The Dik-dik's Solitude: New and Selected Works (2003), Uxudo (1999), and Mayg-shem Fish (1995). |
