Monday, September 12, 2022

PennSound Celebrates Jackson Mac Low's Centennial

Today we celebrate the 100th birthday of polymath poet Jackson Mac Low, born on September 12, 1922. That certainly seems like a worthwhile reason to revisit some of the many recordings housed on his PennSound author page.

There you'll find a wide array of audio and video spanning four decades, from the 1970s up till just a few months before his death in December 2004. In addition to numerous readings — including seven Segue Series sets, recordings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Living Theater, the Line Reading Series, PhillyTalks, the Radio Reading Project, the Orono 40s conference, the Sound & Syntax International Festival of Sound Poetry, and more — along with talks from the St. Mark's Talks series, SUNY-Buffalo, the New Langton Arts Center, and LINEbreak, videos from Public Access Poetry and Mac Low's 75th birthday festschrift, and numerous complete album releases (often with Anne Tardos). A few more recent additions include his 1975 reading at Naropa University and  a 1978 video of Jackson Mac Low and Tom Leonard reading at the Sound and Syntax International Festival of Sound Poetry.

If this embarrassment of riches seems a little overwhelming, or if you're new to Mac Low's prodigious career, it might be helpful to start with the 2008 book launch event for Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, which features Tardos, Charles Bernstein, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Drew Gardner, Joan Retallack, Chris Mason, or PoemTalk #46 on Mac Low's "Words nd Ends from Ez."