A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998

Some Ways Philosophy Has Helped to Shape My Work

119 jackson mac low Some Ways Philosophy Has Helped to Shape My Work In a personal account of the relation of philosophy to the making of experimental poetry, Jackson Mac Low shows how his radically text-based writing may be read in terms of its intellectual history. Mac Low discusses the early influence on his work of the Chicago Aristotelians (Richard McKeon,R. S. Crane) and their revisionist reading of the Poetics,as well as the inspiration of Paul Goodman, a poet and cultural activist who argued for personal liberation during the political repression of the 1950s.The Chicago School admired Aristotle for valorizing poetry as an object of knowledge (in opposition to Plato); for seeing tragedy as a scene of instruction (versus aestheticism); for refusing formal proscription (as with the New Critics); and for unlinking art from history (as with the Left). Each of these interpretations would be crucial for Mac Low’s strategies for constructing alternative communities through formal experiment, particularly in his use of chance techniques after Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Mac Low also insists that an artist’s use of philosophy is serious even if it occurs through misreadings and conflicting lines of thought. Thus the influence of Asian philosophy —particularly Zen but also the I Ching—can make sense of concepts of synchronicity in C. G. Jung or occasion in A. N. Whitehead. In Mac Low’s essay, multiple philosophical traditions conjoin to provide interpretative frameworks for experimental poetics. Jackson Mac Low died on 8 December 2004. Philosophy has always “influenced” my poetry and other art work, if what is designated by the term “philosophy” comprises both the published original and translated works of recognized Western philosophers, translations and interpretations of Asian religious philosophers, and published and orally communicated philosophical ideas of relatively contemporary Americans, Europeans , and Asians. In the space available I will be able only to outline briefly some of the ways philosophy has significantly influenced my work. Although I “majored” in philosophy in the early 1940s at the University of Chicago and I have continually read philosophical works since then, my competence as a student of philosophy has never been very great. But possibly this very incompetence has been fruitful. That is, philosophers may have influenced my work meaningfully through misreadings or through misapplications (or skewed applications) of concepts (or even dogmas) gained from more or less valid readings and from oral teaching. I’ll try to illustrate this. 120 jackson mac low At the University of Chicago in the late 1930s and early 1940s certain members of the philosophy department (notably, Richard Peter McKeon) and of the English department (notably, Ronald Salmon Crane) developed what came to be known as“Chicago Aristotelian”formal criticism. Until he left Chicago in about 1940, Paul Goodman contributed crucially to this development, and his book The Structure of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) is his own later revision of his own c. 1940 doctor’s thesis. However, I did not study directly with McKeon and Crane until 1942, although some of my philosophy and English teachers in 1939–41 had probably been influenced by them. Aristotle’s Poetics was then widely and intensively studied at Chicago, not only in the courses of the Chicago Aristotelians themselves, but also in many other courses in philosophy, criticism, comparative literature, etc. The reigning interpretation of the Poetics was one that ran counter to the “recipe book” view of the work that had mostly prevailed since the Renaissance. The Chicago Aristotelians and their fellow travelers viewed the Poetics as an empirical formal analysis of the particular type of tragedy exemplified preeminently by Sophokles’ Oedipus Tyrannos and Euripedes’ Iphigenia in Tauros. That is, the Poetics was seen as an analytically descriptive, backward-looking work, rather than as a prescriptive, forward-looking one. It followed that one would have to develop a somewhat different poetics for other types of tragedy, e.g., those of Shakespeare. It would not do to condemn later tragedies for “not living up to” the general principles Aristotle had drawn from analyzing Oedipus T., etc. Goodman, in his Structure of Literature, even re-did Aristotle’s own analysis to come up with a somewhat different poetics of the Oedipus type of tragedy. From this followed a general principle of criticism that has been of immense help to me during the forty-odd years since McKeon, Crane, and others brought it to my attention, namely, that critics should follow the artists rather than trying to...