Jackson Mac Low; Pieces O' Six
Series No.: SMC 017
ISBN: 978-1557130600, Pages: 188
A Sun & Moon title.
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Beginning in 1983 the great American experimentalist Jackson Mac Low wrote a poem in prose in longhand on the first six pages of a school composition book; another poem of equal length followed. So was born PIECES O' SIX, thirty-three prose pieces of six pages each, leaving his 200 page composition book with two blank pages for preface and postface. The results of this filled notebook are some of Mac Low's most brilliant and lucid writings, pieces of various kinds; many paratactic, though often quasi-narrative; some seemingly out-and-out stories; others much like essays, but deceptively so; a few of them collages drawing from various sources by chance-selection or other chance-generated systems. All of them are "different," different from each other and from Mac Low's previous writings, and all of them result in a miraculous adventure in language. From a "piece" about Nazi collaborators to a poetic relation of the effects of small ailments and little problems with large consequences for humans and objects both ("One of the reasons Napoleon lost at Waterloo was he couldn't be continuously in command because he had hemorrhoids."), from a "Merzgedict" for artist-performer Kurt Schwitters to an aphoristic set of sentences linked by association of key words, Mac Low explores language in all its forms, in its most private and everyday usages.