I enjoy the chance component in Mac Low's work as an accommodation with
nature.
In some other artforms this accommodation is overt and is part of what one
appreciates, e.g. a shaped and polished walnut knife-handle. No-one minds
the whorls and loops of the walnut, no-one complains that they were the
work of nature and not the artist, - on the contrary one sees the artist's
creativity as synergic with the amazing natural patterning.
There's an integrity in the direct way that natural pattern meets the
reader of Mac Low's poems - Writers have always tried to "paint" nature,
but this shows you it. -
However though this is exciting and fertile with new possibilities, it is
not totally new... every poem is in fact an accommodation with nature,
though it might attempt to deceive you into thinking it's an ab initio
creation, an original work of Man in God's Image along Sidneian lines. For
at some level every poem is partly-created by the physical medium of
transcription, the author's metabolism, the weather and all sorts of other
things (sociological, for example) that are outside the official author's
control.
So there is nothing in Mac Low's means of production that is unprecedented,
and I think we ought to call it poetry.
|