Whenever I answer the phoneIt's never youEven if it was youIt'd never be youSayingHello it's meI love you so muchI can hardly wait to see youCan I come over right nowYes yes yes yesSo I hate the sound of the phone& worseTo answer itHello helloNo I'm not meI'm not hereI'll never be
Except for possibly the last line (I can't decide whether I love it or hate it) this is a beautiful, simple, philosophical and playful poem. Why couldn't he have written these instead of letting chance get in there and take over? Just because of some stupid buddhist commandment about refuting the ego? Sometimes an ego is needed I think. Someone has to do something after all. Someone has to do the writing and if you can do it as well as he can then why the fuck not! I feel kind of cheated that there isn't more of these.
So anyway, after reading Mac Low's work I wrote a silly thing about my most vivid memory from Standard Four which involved pencils, compasses and indiscriminate stabbings. Hmm.
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Jackson MacLow's "phone" is breathtaking -- not principally because of the first page, or "theme," but rather because of the exquisite, partly chance-determined transformations to which this opening is subjected. Take another look at the last three pages, or variations, of the poem. These render the opening sentiment even more poignant. The chance operations have enabled the poet to discover/unveil new nuances and ramifications.
ReplyDeleteI once saw Mr. MacLow read this poem. Simple, unpretentious, altogether compelling.
Hi Mark,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. I'm sure it would be stunning read aloud. I think we might be talking about matters of personal preference here, I know I certainly am. I definitely admire MacLow's pioneering attitude and breaking down of the the traditional 'authorship' and his work with chance operation, we probably wouldn't have such a rich heritage of post-modern peotry without him. But at the same time I have reservations about how much of it I want to read, and I mean on the page here as opposed to performed which are, for me, two completely different modes.
In short I prefer poetry that packs an entire world into each line. I like poetry that works extremely hard and works me extremely hard and I'm not sure subtly nuanced repetition is enough to keep me interested or want to go back and read those sections again. I guess I found so much beauty and complexity in that first section which was then slowly expanded on in the later sections and I wanted more than that slow expansion. I just wanted more, more in the way that the first section definitely delivered. I guess I'm fairly conservative in my love of dense lyric poetry. And maybe if MacLow had just left it at the first section and not introduced chance operation then it would have been just another lyric poem (J.A.L.P?), which is fair enough and a good reason to do something different. But knowing that still doesn't change how I read it or enjoy it.
MacLow is certainly an artist, and that is what I like about his work, it is so uncompromising, so driven by experimentation.
His 'Instructions for Dancers' (if I remember the title correctly) is another matter altogether. I absolutely adore those, they somehow marry the experiment, the form, the subject(s) and the language beautifully. Brilliant!