Mac Low

A landmark publication in computer-generated poetry drawn from the works of Gertrude Stein.

The Stein poems of Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) were written between 1998 and 2003. Comprising more than 500 pages of text, this edited series of 161 poems--most of them never published--is the poet’s last great work, composed during the final years of a lifetime of prolific creation.

The raw material of each poem was produced through Mac Low’s diastic text-selection method of reading through passages of either Ulla E. Dydo’s A Stein Reader or a corrected version of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Guided by Charles O. Hartman’s 1994 DIASTEX5 computer program, which replicates the diastic method first developed by Mac Low in 1963, the process requires that words be drawn sequentially from the source text in accordance with their rule-driven, algorithmic correspondence with a seed text.

Taken as a whole, these poems are a breathtaking invitation to the reader into a space of creative possibilities and unforeseen encounters.

Jackson Mac Low was a leading member of the Fluxus group, an innovator of procedural poetics and liminal compositional forms, and a progenitor of the Language Poets and other conceptual artists.

Michael O’Driscoll is Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Along with Anne Tardos, he is the coeditor of Jackson Mac Low’s The Complete Light Poems.