Jackson Mac Low: The poem I've been futzing around with for c. 16 days
[The following letter & poem are as found in our email correspondence from 2003. The Naropii reference is to a question I had raised about using some of Jackson’s aleatory procedures in a workshop at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac school that coming summer, & the initials LP refer of course to Jackson’s Light Poems. A small portion of the formatting has been modified or distorted in the transfer to blogger, but may be better viewed in the Jacket2 version. (J.R.)]
From: Jackson Mac Low
To: jeromerothenberg@hotmail.com
Subject: the poem I've been futzing around with for c. 16 days
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 15:44:21 -0400
Dear Jerry
I'm attaching "Touching Chickens the Don until It Doesn't" to make me stop messing with it. The source is a mix of verbal materials I gathered from works by GM Hopkins, Charles Hartshorne, Gertrude Stein, and Lewis Carroll--with a lot of choices etc. during the making time. (That started on 20 May and just ended today, 6/4/03.)
(Once in a while I get bogged down this way.)
The form is sort of a bow to an old friend I met the day I got here on my 21st birthday and by happenstances turned out to be an old friend of the lady I lived with in the village and a friend of someone he introduced to me after an anarchist meeting who became one of my closest anarchist friends who lived near Woodstock. Both dead now.
As for naropii--why chicken them by harnessing them with one of my ancient complicated groups of methods? This way they won't get the idea that all they have to do is just pop something into a machine and thereby make a poem.
The old complex methods won't make them write any better, and they know nothing about their quasi-Buddhist roots + humanism + anarchism + unfashionable metaphysics & poetics & all the rest of my craziness. And they don't need to. A simplified LP method shd suit them much better. Tell 'em to each dream up a genus of "things" with some resonance for that particular person and bring names of members of the species thereof into one or more poems, writing in sentences etc. that include one of the species' names, thus designating an individual of that species (e.g., an instance of "arclight"). Otherwise I'd give them free rein as to forms of the poems and burdens thereof. A list poem such as LP 1 shdnt be encouraged.
But all that's up to you. The mix of the humane and the machinic, the intentional and the quasi-nonintentional is where I'm at. Nothing a human being does can be nonintentional & why shd it? But the attempted mix is a good thing. We have to leave the door open to the fact that we're nothing and our identity's a dream, but one that's not only unavoidable but necessary for us to do the slightest thing.
God bless Malevich! But he done his bit and got bit for it. Shittin' Bolsheviks!
love to you both and to Matthew
jml
Touching Chickens the Don
until It Doesn’t
{ Hopetc 1 }
It’s in a way touching
said Don to Andrea
that you’ve been calling Schwitters
nihilistic
and his scarless
festivalselections
discontenting and delusive
as snowflakes in a summer atmosphere.
Are sunbeams’ living spirits a-dwindling?
The motionable shadowy selves of patience
gold
blue
seemingly immaculate
have never selected motherwords.
Three banded canine bodies
snap at timbers overhead.
Time developed
corresponding discontented frights
with perfect navels.
Three
thoughtfully blue
conceived a blinding wince.
Dispensing with days
they motionably lifted
fast
beating welcomes to the morning.
Between impatience
and selection
behavioristic discontented bandits
snatch up violets.
Aren’t you enjoying
your new behavior’s singularity?
Who was it called
fast
beating patience
miniSchwittersistic behavior
of nonbehavioristic body tops?
Rooted be the healing glass of humankind!
Spiritmystery light
riddles all allaying pseudoimmaculate breath.
Time and sunbeams
always moving
never motionable
hymn a dwindling sweetness
coloring breath.
Fast
beating praise
cannot cap a scarless navel.
Living minimotionably
ever moved
banded trees
never wink or blink at lilac erections.
Who conceived that chimney voice
winking at mothers’ patience?
Who’d riddle a scarless navel with infinite light?
Infinity isn’t witty.
Are you
Beth and Mellie’s intellectual mother?
Mother,
they say you’ve mothered three timberless mysteries!
Hand the golden glass no more to Mother.
What caps a mother's mothering?
No mother is scarless.
Timber’s dwindling’s inconceivable!
Who could’ve conceived
or composed
a conception of that dwindling?
Who
breathing between three laws
on snowflakeaccumulating skydays
would share the timber overhead?
Your mother’s
breath
conceived your heart.
Yours the breath your mother's heart conceives.
When morning's wincing fingergaps share living blackness
the day
star’s
light
is right as sightlight.
Great
wincing
disperses the light of glowing flesh
Who is the banded bowman
snatching a longedfor wink?
Patient allayers look at him through immaculate fingergaps.
All through the breathing world
the day
star’s
dear and healing light
arrives through vast
distances from a swirling sphere of unimaginably fiery gases.
Fast
beating praise
is panning around in our blackness.
Mothers’
marks
from bearing and nursing humankind are shared by humankind.
Glass must often cap
sunbeams
before they can sweetly heal.
Lightly breathing mystery
riddles the infinite rightness
of sightlight.
Is any bare and lightless world
dearer than the daystar?
Your mother’s
breath conceived your heart.
What is the richness of a flash?
However vast
it never is dearer
than the daystar.
Unnumbered painters
share
with patience and impatience
humankind’s
mystery light.
Not in a vast
flash
do the mothers conceive all humankind.
Is Bethany’s healing mystery
lighting more than breath?
What savior might conceive the infinite healing
beggedfor by the world’s
elemental wound?
Always being moved
wounded and unwincing
the unmotionable atmosphere is dying.
Blind
blue
heaven will harbor
no
living spirit.
The daystar
unmothering
unobservably maculate
will glow unseen
until it doesn’t.
Jackson Mac Low
New York: 20 May–4 June 2003
Poems and poetics