George Quasha on the late Jackson MacLow:
"We get different results when we listen or read for something—something we think we want and already know how to hear (poetry!)—than when we allow language to freely talk to us, perhaps through us, or indeed to guide our thinking according to an unknown axis. . . .
"Jackson went on beyond procedure, as mentioned, to a new order of
spontaneous composition, which also performatively changed the physical
dimension of poetics. (I for one have never recovered from hearing
them: the responsive alteration of ear-mind is unidirectional.) This is
hard to explain; one has to listen “deeply” (to use Pauline Oliveros’s
term for transformative listening) to the performance voices of both
Cage and Mac Low to register the magnitude of the event inside the
voice. It can alter our whole sense of the poetic vehicle and what it
tells us about language. . . .
"There’s a reciprocity between language and mind that we can feel but
hardly understand. It seems to give, for one thing, direct access to the
state of mind that is the release and receptivity of the poetic act . . . . "
More on MacLow's practice of "gathering," a core principle of projective verse (cf. Charles Olson):
". . . he composed from the field of language wherever he was (at home, out in
the city, traveling abroad), drawing words, phrases, even whole
sentences from language he read, saw, heard, or thought in the moment of
writing. He called it “gathering,” not “chance” . . ."
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