{"id":7073,"date":"2011-10-15T10:14:11","date_gmt":"2011-10-15T14:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=7073"},"modified":"2011-10-15T10:14:11","modified_gmt":"2011-10-15T14:14:11","slug":"jackson-mac-low-writing-through-ezra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/jackson-mac-low-writing-through-ezra\/","title":{"rendered":"Jackson Mac Low Writing Through Ezra"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Writing through Ezra (PoemTalk #46)<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Jackson Mac Low, “Words nd Ends from Ez”<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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POEMTALK<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jackson Mac Low, Ezra Pound<\/p>\n

LISTEN TO THE SHOW<\/a><\/p>\n

Writes Al Filreis, PoemTalk’s producer & host:<\/p>\n

PoemTalk travelled to\u00a0Bard College<\/a>, where we gathered with\u00a0Charles Bernstein<\/a>,\u00a0Pierre Joris<\/a>, and Bard’s own\u00a0Joan Retallack<\/a>\u00a0to talk about\u00a0Jackson Mac Low<\/a>‘s\u00a0Words nd Ends from Ez<\/em>\u00a0(1989). The project was composed in ten parts, one part each for sections (sometimes called \u201cdecades\u201d) of Ezra Pound’s lifework,\u00a0The Cantos<\/em>. We chose to discuss\u00a0the penultimate part<\/a>\u00a0of Mac Low’s diastic written-through work, a poem based on phrases, words, and letters drawn from \u2014 and in some sense\u00a0about<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 Pound’s near-final cantos,\u00a0Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII<\/em>.\u00a0 Mac Low\u2019s constraint, for which he preferred the term \u201cquasi-intentional\u201d to the term \u201cchance,\u201d involved the letters forming the name E Z R A\u00a0 P O U N D.\u00a0 Words, phrases, and letters were extracted from the original cantos based on those letters and on their placement within words. Charles, Pierre, Joan, and Al Filreis explain this in detail, although we cannot quite agree as to whether Mac Low was being absolutely strict in the application of the diastic method. As Bernstein notes several times, this particular procedure is one of the more complex Mac Low used. Nonetheless, it\u2019s the sense of the group that when semantic meaning seems to be created, it has about it, as Pierre Joris happily notes, the special pleasure of serendipity, and means all the more. Thus the poem\u2019s commentary on Pound, its both aesthetic and ethical positioning with respect to Pound, is profounder than it might have been otherwise, had the poem been a “sincerely felt\u201d subjective lyric response to the final Poundian ethos \u2014 an oscillation between stubborn repetition of earlier modes and\u00a0mea culpa<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

October 13, 2011<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing through Ezra (PoemTalk #46) Jackson Mac Low, “Words nd Ends from Ez” POEMTALK Jackson Mac Low, Ezra Pound LISTEN TO THE SHOW Writes Al Filreis, PoemTalk’s producer & host: PoemTalk travelled to\u00a0Bard College,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,91,93,1074],"tags":[229,316,1072,1073,601],"class_list":["post-7073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticism","category-poetry","category-poetry-readings","category-radio","tag-charles-bernstein","tag-ezra-pound","tag-jackson-mac-low","tag-joan-retallack","tag-pierre-joris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7073"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7086,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7073\/revisions\/7086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}