Jackson Mac Low: November 5, 1975

The Poetry Center presents Jackson Mac Low presenting a variety of his works. The poet plays a magnetic-tape collage, presents solo readings of six poems, and group performances, vocal and musical, of three of his "simultaneities." Mac Low, visiting from New York City, is joined by Bay Area guest artists Charles Amirkhanian, Blackberri, Irene Dogmatic, Steve Ruppenthal, and Al Santoli. Among multiple works, Mac Low reads from 22 Light Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 1968) and "The Presidents of the United States of America," frequently adopting chance operations and other de-centering interventions into his composition and performance practice.

The extended event takes place on San Francisco State University's music performance stage, Knuth Hall, in the Creative Arts Building, on a Wednesday afternoon, with Poetry Center director Lewis Mac Adams introducing — and with his introduction subsumed into the magnetic-tape performance of Mac Low's opening work, "A Threnody for Sylvia Plath." 

Marginalia: a portion of silent video recorded just prior to the start of the program is included here following the conclusion of the recorded performance.

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
Knuth Hall, San Francisco State University
Date
1975-11-05
Event Run Time
01:42:28
Contributors
Lewis MacAdams
Charles Amirkhanian
Blackberri [Charles Timothy Ashmore]
Irene Dogmatic
Steve Ruppenthal
Al Santolli
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu. 

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Jackson Mac Low (01:39:16)

Beginning (as "voice-over" he notes, off-mic) alongside Lewis MacAdams' introduction, Jackson Mac Low plays his magnetic tape-collage "A Threnody for Sylvia Plath." The work, he indicates, "has words said by Diane Wakoski, the late Paul Blackburn, Sonia Sanchez, Tom Weatherly, and Gregory Corso," being composed from "readings given at Grand Haven State College [now Grand Valley State University, Allendale], in Michigan, in the summer of 1971."

The assembled group — Charles Amirkhanian, Blackberri, Irene Dogmatic, Steve Ruppenthal, and Al Santoli, with Mac Low — then performs "Guru-Guru Gatha," one of Mac Low's "simultaneities," from that work's hand-drawn visual-textual score. 

Mac Low moves to solo poems, reading "32nd Light Poem: In Memoriam Paul Blackburn—9–10 October 1971." Then, after speaking to the provenance and compositional method of The Light Poems, he reads "14th Light Poem: For Frances Witlin—10 August 1962" (with a brief gloss), and, after some commentary, the considerably longer "48th Light Poem: 2nd Light Poem for Rochelle Owens—3 August 1975" (the latter incorporating multiple stutters, hesitations, mistatements, misspellings, et al., into the poem and its performance).

The group — voices and piano, guitar, trumpet, and marimba — then performs Mac Low's verbal-musical simultaneity, "A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin."

Mac Low follows, after noting his cassette recorder with which he was recording the event has started eating the tape, by performing solo the tour de force "Verbs with Gerunds and Infinitives," after which he wants a "less wordy" piece and performs "Phoneme Dance, for/from John Cage," that work incorporating measured silences among its sounded phonemic parts derived from Cage's name.

Mac Low then reads his longer poem, "The Presidents of the United States of America," a work which he notes "was written in 1963, February and May that year, and derives its nucleus words, the words that recur, from the Phoenician meanings of the letters of the presidents' names." 

The event concludes with a final group performance of Mac Low's simultaneity, "Electrical Fields May Turn You On."

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