432

This review of Jackson Mac Low’s work by a music critic is one of a number of reviews that show how the poet-musician’s compositions were performed and received among an intermedial avant-garde milieu. Writers describe how Mac Low’s works combined vocalized words to create music, achieving abstract musicality and rhythm through the repetition and reconfiguration of a small selection of words and/or word fragments. Mac Low’s texts are meant to be performed live, interpreted by vocalists and musicians but also visual artists and dancers. Rather than being read from beginning to end, some are interpreted according to a rule-based yet indeterminate system that generates varying results. Mac Low did not match the figure of the solitary poet. Rather, he was an adaptable collaborator and multi-instrumentalist whose anarchist politics were matched by an anarchist aesthetics that brought individual voices and interpretations together into chaotic, irreducible, and irreconcilable ensembles.