Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces, 1955-2002

Termed "America's most indefatigable experimental poet" by Publishers Weekly, Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) was recognized internationally as a master innovator for nearly five decades. Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 1955-2002 presents a comprehensive collection of the poet's handwritten, drawn, typographic and musical notations―works composed through non-intentional methods and which operate simultaneously as visual art, literature and scores for performance. The book includes detailed performance instructions as well as notes on the specific procedures of composition through which the works were created. The curious reader finally has access to some of the most important yet most elusive works within Mac Low's oeuvre, including many examples of the "Gathas," "Vocabularies," "Asymmetries," "Light Poems" and more. Doings performs the dual task of sourcebook and Baedeker, a looking glass through which to see both where we've been and where we're going as we sift through the radical poetries of the postmodern era looking for renewal, for the inevitable path to the future. It includes an introduction by publisher Steve Clay, five gate-fold pull-outs and a 60-minute CD of live and studio performance recordings from 1960 on.
"Jackson Mac Low's art returns us to something like the stance of an earlier avant-garde (Russian Futurism, Dada, etc.) for which artistic, spiritual & political renewals were all part of a single impulse. In no contemporary does it show through as clearly, movingly, this vision of experimental/language-centered art as social action… Mac Low, who [was] one of our true inventors, create[d] new modes & [brought] us back to the oldest possibilities of sound & language as they enter poetry & music & performance… The more one treats the book not only as a text but as a source & manual―the more one realizes the service of this work, its lasting power. It is in this sense that the book becomes, in Ezra Pound's words, 'a ball of light in one's hands.'" --Jerome Rothenberg

Born in 1922 in Chicago, Jackson Mac Low is a poet, composer, playwright, early participant in Fluxus, and maker of verbal and musical multimedia performances and radio works. His visual work and performances have been widely seen throughout North America, Europe, and Australia, and his honors include The 1999 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NYFA, and the NEA. Mac Low taught at New York University for seven years, and his recent publications include Open Secrets, Barnesbook, and 42 Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters. Mac Low lives in New York with his wife and frequent collaborator, Anne Tardos.