Jackson Mac Low, The Complete Stein Poems 1998-2003, ed. Michael O’Driscoll

 

            Indeed, as Mac Low was at pains to emphasize time andagain in the last decades of his life, procedural operations are anything but amatter of chance:

In the 1960s, when Ifirst devised and utilized deterministic methods, I thought that the methodsthat I know realize are deterministic were kinds of chance operations. It wasonly in the early 90s that I realized that such methods are basically differentfrom chance operations. The principal difference is that if one employs adeterministic text-selection method correctly, using the same sourcetext and seed text and making no mistakes, the method’s output willalways be exactly the same. Chance operations produce a different output eachtime they are utilized. Deterministic methods do not involve what could rightlybe called “chance,” or as many artists have termed it, “objective hazard.”

The Tucson lecture, whichI’ve cited here and throughout my introduction, and which follows as a furtherintroduction to this volume, is an important example of Mac Low’s extendedattempts to nuance the historical record of his role as the champion of chanceoperations. As I’ve documented elsewhere, from about 1980 onward Mac Lowrepeatedly sought to correct the overemphasis on chance and what he no longerregarded as the “egoless” composition of purportedly nonintentional works. Thiseffort extended, importantly, to his own central statements on the allied workof John Cage, including the essay “Cage’s Writing up to the Late 1980s,” whichMac Low revised no fewer than five times over a period of fifteen years with anincreasing emphasis that accentuates his own investments in this piece. Thecentral point of Mac Low’s 2001 version of the essay is that while Cage’smesostic methods are nonintentional and deterministic, the textual selectionsand aesthetic judgments that precede and follow the mesostic procedure arematters of choice. But this reluctance to subordinate fully his own creativeimpulses to procedural or chance determinants was also very much in keepingwith his regular refusal of the label “experimental poet.” For Mac Low, the useof deterministic procedural methods was not, as is so often supposed, a matterof experimentation. (Michael O’Driscoll, ““This shining makes revision of astring more strange”: An Introduction to Jackson Mac Low’s The CompleteStein Poems”)

I’mimpressed by the heft, at nearly six hundred pages, of the newly-publishedcollection The Complete Stein Poems 1998-2003 by Jackson Mac Low, editedby Michael O’Driscoll, with a foreword by Anne Tardos (Cambridge MA: The MITPress, 2025). The Complete Stein Poems assembles Mac Low’s final, great proceduralwork together for the first time, meticulously compiled and criticallyarticulated by critic Michael O’Driscoll, a Professor in the Department ofEnglish and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In case you aren’taware, 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 ofthe Fluxus group, an innovator of procedural poetics and liminal compositional forms,and a progenitor of the Language Poets and other conceptual artists.”

Thepoems that make up The Complete Stein Poems was composed, as editor O’Driscollwrites in his introduction, across more than half a decade through a preciseformal procedure “[…] that Mac Low himself had invented in 1963 in order togenerate poetic material determined by algorithmic rules. This latest versionof the program, crated in 1994 at Mac Low’s request, was a fifth generation ofthe original 1989 DIASTEXT code, now revised to handle larger inputs. The algorithm,following Mac Low’s procedure, sequentially drew words from the source textthat correspond to the placement of letters in the seed text. The placement ofletters in the first word of the seed, ‘l-i-t-t-l-e’ in this case, resulted inthe first line of the output: ‘Little lIngering faTher titTlereguLar simplE.’ Having completed a full cycle of testing thesource text against the seed text, the program terminated its output atthirty-five lines. Saving the results to his hard drive, now in the wee hoursof the morning of April 28, Mac Low would go on to massage the raw output thefollowing day, excising and altering redundant words, introducing capitals,periods, and line spaces to give the poem its desired form, titling the resultfrom the initial and concluding words of the poem, and recording the wholeprocess and the interventions he’d made into a summary ‘makingways’ note alongwith the location and date that concludes the poem.” The source text that O’Driscollrefers 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 ofthis project, pushing language into and against itself, twisting the possibilitiesof sound and meaning through a highly formal and precise procedure. As thepiece “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 / notcame something / was her / her come / come her that.” The Complete SteinPoems is certainly a precursor to multiple, possibly hundreds, of other proceduralworks, whether Christian Bök’s infamous and award-winning Eunoia (TorontoON: Coach House Books, 2001) or Derek Beaulieu’s “The Newspaper,” as well asmore recent work by Ottawa poet Grant Wilkins.

Givencontemporary conversations and concerns around creativity and AI, one certainlywouldn’t confuse this as a work done by machine, as the human hand stillremains central to Mac Low’s creation, from the final edits and touches to thedevelopment of the initial process. One can read through the poems withoutnotation, or move deeply through the precise detail of how Mac Low moved fromsource material to where each piece landed, through Mac Low’s hand. Or thefirst poem, “Little Beginning,” a piece cited “New York: 27-28 April 1998; 23March, 29 April 2002” that offers the note: “Derived from a page (and precedingline) of Gertrude Stein’s ‘A Long Gay Book’ (A Stein Reader, edited byUlla E. Dydo, last line of 240 through 241—determined by a logarithm table) viaCharles O Hartman’s program DIASTEX5, his latest automation of one of mydiastic procedures developed in 1963, using the 1st paragraph of thesource as seed, and subsequent editing: some excisions of words, changes ofword order within lines; and changes and additions of capitals, periods, andspaces.” As the first half of that piece reads:

Little lingering fatherlittle regular simple.

 

Little long length therelouder happening deepening.

Beginning and little waysinging neat cooked.

Difference certain lengthtime light much lighting. 

Description certain choosingis the piece.

Pleasant the derangedrhubarb pudding permitted stay.

Sit sing laugh soilingnot lingering sing.

Singing differenceconclude long so to mention.

Length is stay sit singlaugh soiling beginning.

Singing and any and whichthe way singing has higher.

Is material long veryfried the pears when abuse. 

And say filled makesafternoon with children there.

It is.