Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works

In her enlightening forward to this newest gathering of avant-garde poet Mac Low’s work, Tardos makes the case that Mac Low (1922-2004) had an over-arching interest throughout his career in creating “things of beauty,” a bombshell of a statement considering Mac Low’s oeuvre, made up in large part of Zen-inspired “chance” experiments and ungainly language clusters like “Ugolino, / re oN rlin / Dysentery / Eille eZzato paRently.” Mac Low’s work has always been interesting, but beautiful? This collection, which follows two previous selections, does the best job to date in providing a window into Mac Low’s unique perspective on what constitutes poetic beauty, showcasing a wide range of his poetry, from earnest political juvenilia to concrete-poetic text experiments, and featuring the previously less represented work Mac Low did in his last 20 years. Mac Low’s more personal, less overtly process-generated, lyrics reveal the modernist and Romantic roots of Mac Low’s sensibility. “No. no. no. Hear! The between,” he wrote in 1946 in “Hear I here,” laying out his lifetime preoccupation with “betweenness.” Mac Low continued to listen dutifully until his death. This book provides a rewarding testament to his ability to transcribe what he heard. (Jan.)