Jackson Mac Low

Avant-Garde Poet and Performance Artist

Jackson Mac Low (born September 12, 1922 - died December 8, 2004) was a US-American poet, composer, writer of performance pieces, essays, radio works and plays, a painter and multimedia performance artist. He is best known for his poetry however, and had many books published in his life time. He pushed the written and spoken forward in a way that was as radical was what John Cage (who composed music for one of Mac Low's plays) did with music. Much of his later work was done in collaboration with his second wife, Anne Tardos. Among his other collaborators was La Monte Young with whom he published the legendary book An Anthology (which included contributions from George Brecht, Claus Bremer, Earle Brown, Joseph Byrd, John Cage, David Degener, Walter De Maria, Henry Flynt, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Terry Jennings, Dennis, Ding Dong, Ray Johnson, Jackson Mac Low, Richard Maxfield, Malka Safro, Simone Forti, Nam June Paik, Terry Riley, Diter Rot, James Waring, Emmett Williams, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young). To celebrate his 75th birthday, Crayon magazine published a book and CD titled "Festschrift for Jackson Mac Low's 75th Birthday" with pieces from Jackson Mac Low's friends from around the world. Among the contributors to this was Sten Hanson who has stated that Mac Low is his favorite poet (see the track "That Jackson Is My Favourite Poet" on the CD Text-Sounds Gems & Trinkets).