Asymmetries of my own: such as Hegelian "Reason"

Jackson Mac Low

It's hard to read Jackson Mac Low & resist the temptation at the same time to try some of his experimental stuff, such as the"Asymmetries", poems (in Mac Low's own words) "of which the words, punctuation, typography, and spacing of words on the page have been determined by certain kinds of chance operations." (from Representative Works: 1938-1985, 106). More particularly, an "acrostic-chance" operation by which words, phrases and even individual syllables are randomly chosen from either reading materials or the poet's own immediate environment & just as randomly displayed down and across the page. Again, Mac Low,

Usually an initial word was found in a text (or in the environment) and words (or strings) having its letters as their initial letters were then found by reading along in the text (or by careful perception of the environment). After the first line, the initial letters of the words or strings of which acrostically "spelled out" the first word, words beginning with the second and subsequent letters of the first word were found to begin the second and subsequent lines, and these words were spelled out in those lines.

But since Mac Low was a performance poet (and musician) he took great pains to spell out the various types of performance methods as well, going into meticulous detail about the intonation, pitch, silence, loudness and vocal arrangements involved in the reading of the 501 Asymmetries he'd written. And both methods and poems were to be chosen (sometimes even during performance) through an equally ingenious use of dice, numbers, & filing cards arrangements.

I've chosen as the source-text for my "Asymmetries" poem Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and "Reason" as my initial word, which was actually the first word I saw when I cracked open Volume I. I will follow the simplest version of the "acrostic-chance" method, not even omitting conjunctions, articles or bothering to change the original capitalization & punctuation in the source-text. I'll arrange words and word-strings in a format suggested by the philosophical tenor of Hegel's text (and in accordance with Mac Low's injunctions to poet & performer to be "sensitive and inventive"). First the poem and then some comments.

                  Reason embraced, any speculation of Now


                  embraced, may be relation
                                              and character
                                                                  even do


                  any nature yearning


                  speculation philosophy excluded,
                                              choose upon labour
                                              attain the in of necessary,


                  of feeling


                  Now over world

Is this a poem? Yes, certainly: one that's been derived through an "acrostic-chance" method. Having structure and I might even say the "feel" of something that's reminiscent of the Hegelian dialectic, it's not devoid of unity or even of authorial intention. I see my poem's curiously undercut the source-text's grandiose Absolutist basis (in the line "speculation philosophy excluded") somehow in favour of a more Romantic appeal to "feeling/Now over world." Schlegel and Novalis were not unknown to the young Hegel. As if even the poet's turned the great dialectician on his head or perhaps unearthed a more youthful strain, long suppressed, in the older more ultra-conservative Hegel of the Lectures. Or perhaps because of my own interest years ago in Hegel's early religious writings, I'd unconsciously steered it in that direction even as I was fitting the next piece of the acrostic poem. How interesting!

The young Hegel

The poet of chance operations who means to make his artifacts say something to the reader is faced with the same difficulties as 'consciousness' theorists who can't quite dispense with (as Daniel C. Dennett calls it) the "Cartesian Theatre" in our heads. Despite all the hard evidence for the ultimately sensory origins of understanding, something's still there doing the "thinking".Mac Low, and his practitioners—now myself included—who'd like nothing better than to show that the scaffolding is the poem can't likewise get rid of the poem-maker, however random, indeterminate & chancy the construction. And yet while the poem-maker's there telling us it's the product of the most wildly experimentalist principles of design, the poem seems to have been residing there all along, somewhere deep in the theatre. Mac Low himself seems to have said something similar to this in his more lyrical "56th Light Poem":

The light of poetry's a baffling light.
It doesn't depend on what the poet thinks—or even what he feels!
That extra light that gave old Housman goose bumps.
comes from somewhere beyond or underneath
thought or emotion or will or taste or sense:
a radiation only known through words.

It's perhaps in that "baffling" sense that poetry & philosophy are objects of asymmetries.