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Chapter 4 “Listen and Relate” Buddhism, Daoism, and Chance in the Poetry and Poetics of Jackson Mac Low Jonathan Stalling “Poetry expresses the emotional truth of the self. A craft honed by especially sensitive individuals, it puts metaphor and image in the service of song. Or at least that’s the story we’ve inherited from Romanticism, handed down for over 200 years in a caricatured and mummified ethos—and as if it still made sense after two centuries of radical social change.” With this statement, Craig Dworkin begins his introduction to the UBU Web Anthology of Conceptual Poetry,1 but Dworkin asks, “what would a non-expressive poetry look like. . . . One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with “spontaneous overflow” supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet’s ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself?” Dworkin and his co-editor Kenneth Goldsmith are themselves well-known “conceptual poets,” known for resituating, recycling, or re-purposing expended language forms (past online chat rooms, newspapers, etc.) as poetry in order to challenge the romantic foundations of contemporary poetry nearly a century after the art world first encountered the conceptual artworks of Marcel Duchamp.2 Yet most poets who work out of the conceptual tradition would recognize Jackson Mac Low as the father of these strains of experimental poetry, since he was the first American poet to explore the dynamic possibilities of chance operations in the composition of poetry.3 Difficult, disjunctive, always unexpected, his body of work reveals a sustained and complex engagement with varieties and levels of chance that range from randomized textual production to intuitively composed works. Mac Low also developed one of the most sophisticated and influential Buddho-Daoist poetics of the twentieth century. Indeed, Mac Low’s critique of the lyrical, expressive “I” is a precedent for so-called LANGUAGE 89 90 Writing as Enlightenment poetry years before the rise of poststructuralist theory. Of course, Mac Low was by no means the only poet experimenting with Buddhism and poetry after World War II. After all, the American occupation of Japan, combined with the gradual lifting of the various anti-Asian immigration laws, not only increased immigration and travel across the Pacific, but also marked a new period of intense cultural migrations. As Buddhism and Romanticism both influenced the “Beat Generation” of poets, concepts like “emptiness” and “no self” began to erode the naturalization of the “expressive self” and the autonomous “I” in the work of many other poets of this period. Snyder’s use of classical Chinese aesthetics (as understood vis-à-vis Japanese Zen) to alter and ultimately minimize subjective expression in many of his poems; Joan Kyger’s dry wit and complex self-reflexivity to challenge the “self” and gender roles, predating post-structuralist feminism; and Phillip Whalen’s notion of poetry as that which “wrecks the mind” or “graphs the mind in motion”—these poets’ aesthetic strategies and those of others transform what it means to be a poet. Poetry for this generation of Buddhist practitioners is a deliberate philosophical praxis. Yet none of these interventions can claim to be more radical in their challenge to the expressive “I” than the work of Mac Low. Many of his experiments generate texts through chance operations that largely bypass the writer altogether in order to transform poetry itself into a realization of “no-self.” Mac Low often explicitly points to “the Zen Buddhist motive for use of chance (&c) means” as a method to “generate series of ‘dharmas’ (phenomena/ events, e.g., sounds, words, colored shapes) relatively ‘uncontaminated’ by the composer’s ‘ego’ (taste, constitutional predilections, opinions, current or chronic emotions).”4 In his short essay, “Buddhism, Art, Practice, Polity,” he writes, “Being ‘choicelessly aware’ is perceiving phenomena—as far as possible-without attachment and without bias. Artworks may facilitate this kind of perception by presenting phenomena that are not chosen according to the tastes and predilections of the artists who make them” (177). In the essay, Mac Low traces the origin of Buddhist influence in his work to the early 1950s. At that time, he first encountered Zen in the writing of and personal instruction under Dr. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. Throughout the 1940s, he had studied Daoism and the Book of Changes, which also played a central role in the chance-generated music of John Cage. In this...

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