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.”
(Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jackson-mac-low)
Jackson Mac Low, b. Chicago, 12 September 1922, makes poems, essays, and musical, performance, visual, and radio works. Author of about 30 books and published in over 90 collections, his works have been published, exhibited, and performed (often by his wife, the poet, visual artist, and composer Anne Tardos and himself) in many countries. Awards: Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and CAPS fellowships and the 1999 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets. Recent books: 42 Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters (Barrytown, NY, 1994), 20 Forties (Canary Islands, 1999), Struggle Through (Canada, 2001), Les Quarantains (Extraits) (France, 2001), and
posthumously published books:
Doings: An Assortment of Performance Pieces 1955–2002 (Granary Books, New York, 2005)
Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, Edited by Anne Tardos (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008)
154 Forties, Edited by Anne Tardos (Counterpath Press, Denver, 2012).
The Complete Light Poems: 1-60, Edited by Anne Tardos and Michael O'Driscoll (Chax Press, Victoria, TX, 2015)