ModPo 2013 #61 Initiative and Imagination Required: On Mac Low's Stein 100: A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair"

Sorry, couldn't help it. There is a feather likeness in this chair.

The link to Jackson Mac Low's poem, "Stein 100: A Feather Likeness of The Justice Chair" is here.

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This was another happy (as in happenstance) coincidence! Reading about Mac Low's highly structured process was very interesting. It's amazing how a program like Diastex5 and some "unintentional" tweaking of Mac Low and the source text by Stein could produce lines like:

Summer light bears a likeness to justice.
Then the light is supposing attention.
That section has a resemblance to light.
Is it a likeness of the justice chair?

I mean, that's just brilliant! And that comment by Mac Low in the video discussion. "Did I?" he asks. It's actually the right question because ultimately what he's saying is the poem is not really his: it's his and Stein's and Diastex5's and yours (meaning the reader's).

What was the experience like: not reading for meaning? Sound is beautiful as it is...but one can't escape from meaning. It is the character of language. So, I agree that while the results are unintentional they are imbued with meaning. However, the meaning is not arrived at pre-packaged. It requires initiative and imagination from the reader.

The line that joins a feather to likeness to justice to chair is not a straight line. This new string coming from the strange original string of Stein shifts our focus. It is an immersion in language, calling for associations that can only stem from the imagination. Creativity, here, is not the author's creativity anymore but the shared creativity of source text, manipulator of text and reader of text. There is no story to be told except the story that emerges from all sides.

Here's to the shining quality of you and I detained on this page! 

ModPo 2013 #60 Ephemeral and Communal: On Mac Low's "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore"

Read a preface and a partial recording of the performance of "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore" here.
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I thought, at first, that the performance was very jarring. It really wasn't conventionally beautiful. However, after the video discussion, I think that "conventionally beautiful" wasn't the point. Given the background of Peter Moore,  a documenter of events and happenings, it was appropriate.

I liked the idea of a communal performance piece, something that invites individual contribution (constraints) but cannot be appreciated as a shared whole. Also, aside from this, there was the idea of shifting our attention from the traditional elegy (the conventional narrative) to individual words made out of Peter Moore's name. If we apply the deterministic context of Cage to Mac Low's text, we see that the constrain is Peter Moore's name, even the notes that are played correspond to letters in Moore's name. Each word does and doesn't represent who Peter Innisfree Moore is.

There is a question in the video discussion if certain words are actually descriptive of Moore like "pioneer" and "inspire." But there are a lot of words, too, like "eerie" and "poison" that might have nothing to do with Moore. So, the related and unrelated are mixed together in the performance together with notes sounding at seemingly random points (seemingly random because in Mac Low's instructions, the performer needs complete concentration to be able to deliver the word and note pieces). It is an ephemeral piece, something that honors the work that Moore did. For me, the performance called attention to a life: no narrative, many things coming together, words called out in a dream. I also realized that the performance was about Moore in context of the community he belonged to. It wasn't just about one man but the impact of one man on his friends, on the people he affected.