About the Book
Magazine. Book + CD. This is the 75th birthday Festschrift for Jackson Mac Low: poet, playwright, multimedia performance artist, a founding participant in Fluxus, and composer of music, performance works, and radio works. Contributions include essays, poetry, graphics, photographs, an interview and sixty minutes of music on a CD.
From the introduction to CRAYON 1 by Andrew Levy: "Though it is not my intention to write an introduction on the influence of Buddhism on the work of Jackson Mac Low, I do want to suggest that the relation between his knowledge and practice of Buddhism and his masterful deployment of both nonintentional and intuitive or spontaneous methods of composition (a brilliantly various body of poetic methods several other contributors to this volume speak quite eloquently on) enables us to understand that all notions of self and civilization are culturally induced ways of keeping life at a distance, impersonal, remote, abstract, without feeling. In other words, an alchemist of linguistic matter, Mac Low's art shines a light by which ordinarily diffused states or conditions of life are brought into sharpened focus and infused with energy sufficient to liberate men and women from the largely mechanical, socially coerced, habit-ridden fragmentation of life. In its capacity to act through the abstraction, and so become increasingly immediately infused with its environment, Mac Low's works recover what has been delegitimated in Western culture since Plato--an Immediate knowledge, against the One that subsumed the apparent temporal discontinuities, the contingencies, the differences. Inside this first issue of Crayon, the reader will find poetry, personal reminiscences and tributes, essays, photos and other graphic art, an interview addressing, among other questions, Mac Low's role and participation in Fluxus, and the festchrift CD--all testament to the artist's commitment to his art and his multi-various community of fellow artists and friends."
Contributors: David Abel, Ammiel Alcalay, Joe Amato, Beth Anderson, Jane Augustine, Susan Bee, Peter Behrendsen, Martine Bellen, Steve Benson, Carol Berg', Charles Bernstein, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, David Bromige, Sean Bronzell, Lee Ann Brown, Warren Burt, John Byrum, Louis Cabri, David Cameron, Dave Baptiste Chirot, Jack Collom, Robert Creeley, Jeff Derksen, Stacy Doris, Michael Erlhoff, Dan Farrell, Irving Feldman, Allen Fisher, Henry Flynt, Simone Forti, Allen Ginsberg, Loss Peque¤o Glazier, Michael Gottlieb, Tony Green, Barbara Guest, Sten Hanson, Bob Harrison, Bernard Heidsiek, Michael Heller, Geoffrey Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Francoise Janicot, Gerhard Jaschke, Milton Kessler, Alison Knowles, Jonathan Scott Lee, Andrew Levy, iris lezak, Clarinda Mac Low, Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, Judith Malina, Chris Mann, Peter Manson, Friederike Mayrocker, Raphael Mostel, Susan Smith Nash, Gale Nelson, Morgan O'Hara, Jena Osman, Gil Ott, Rochelle Owens, Ron Padgett, Nick Piombino, Stephen Ratcliffe, Joan Retallack, Janet Rodney, Jim Rosenberg, Jerome Rothenberg, Douglas Rothschild, Armand Schwerner, Spencer Selby, Rod Smith, Ellsworth Snyder, Anne Tardos, Tibor Tardos, Nathaniel Tarn, Henry Taylor, Richard Tuttle, Anne Waldman, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Chet Wiener, Geoffrey Young, Karl Young, Magdalena Zurawski, Nicholas Zurbrugg. On the CD: Eric Andersen, David Behrman, Jeremy Bernstein, Andrew Bolotowsky, Warren Burt, cris cheek, Andrew Culver, Alvin Curran, Moniek Darge, Roger Dean, Kenny Goldsmith, Malcolm Goldstein, Daniel Goode, Gerry Hemingway, Andrew Levy, Jackson Mac Low, Ikue Mori, Charlie Morrow, Gordon Mumma, Godfried-Willem Raes, Hazel Smith, the Splatter Trio, Jim Staley, Anne Tardos, Tui St. George Tucker, Davey Williams.
