This week I’m finally collecting the various threads of notes I’ve been making throughout the summer on Jackson Mac Low, the soundscape of his 1971 Montreal reading/performance, and the critical strategies of working with recorded materials that his performance makes audible. I feel as though I could take another three months on these subjects, as every day of additional reading seems to lead to another vast space of perspectives I hadn’t yet considered, whether about Mac Low himself or about the production of sounds in general.

I’ve always been attracted to Mac Low’s work for the specific reason that the poems look and sound like nothing else I’ve seen or heard before. It’s exactly this reason that I was drawn to write about his Montreal performance: when listening around to the 80+ recordings housed on the SpokenWeb site, Mac Low’s reading is singular. No other reading goes on for so long, no other has this many readers, no other features the use of tape cassette materials, and no other reading is so cacophonous as this. Here is a brief excerpt from the two-hour-long recording:

These singularities open up a space to consider the poetry reading and what sounds resound there, and also – through Mac Low’s exceptionally detailed introductions to compositions and his selective curation/utilization of recorded materials – how we might engage critically with the phonotext. In regard to the first point, I am interested in who makes the sounds, what sounds in the room are included into being part of the poem, and the new forms of participation that Mac Low provokes. In the second, I want to pursue how Mac Low’s use of recorded materials sets an example to consider in our current circulation of phonotexts. Here I consider two specific aspects: one, in which a person’s engagement with phonotexts carries through toward the production of other new phonotexts, and two, a theory of the poet as listener, as one who composes by means of a practice of listening.

I hope to post further excerpts from this writing soon.

Image credit: Excert from “A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore,” Jackson Mac Low.