So now we're going to talk about Jackson Mac Low's engagement with Gertrude Stein. First, we're going to look at his close reading of A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass, that's a piece of Tender Buttons that we struggled with. And then we're going to eventually get to one of his Stein's series poems in which he used the computer program created by Charles Hartmann called Diastics Five, which is the fifth generation of this program that Hartman created for Mac Low, and he generated more than a hundred Stein poems that are essentially using Stein as a source text using Tender Buttons. And we're going to look at Stein 100 which I was privileged to hear read live by Mac Low, in an early version of it back in 1999. So that's what we're going to do. So first it's our job to figure out how he reads Stein's A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass, let me read it. Although we have in our recordings Jackson reading it which is fantastic. Twice actually. "A kind and glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange, a single hurt color," which he interprets as black and it leads him to consider opaqueness and blindness, "and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling, the difference is spreading." Do you remember how hard that was? We did it though, didn't we? OK. So then Jackson Mac Low notices rhyme, strange arrangement. He notices assonance in the short eyes. He notices the end of each of the three sentences, the I-N-G sound, and he notices the internal rhyme of ordinary and unordered, right? And then he says that the three sentences are a closely bound system of sound. By which he means what? He's saying that what he's doing when he reads that poem is he's doing a close reading of the sound. Right. So what does he mean by closely bound system of sound, other than that rhymes? Well, it means that all of the words in the poem are intensely and kind of irrevocably connected by their sounds. Primarily by sounds because it was hard for us to do a close synaptic reading of that poem, right? We came up with something but I don't remember what we came up with. I was more impressed by your reading of it as a system of sound. Than by your... you know, that whole thing about the clarity of a carafe typically but then its opaqueness and has... And we did the difference is spreading, we did fine. But Jackson Mac Low first, in this piece, this interpretation which he performed as a part of a reading and everybody who was there hung on every sound of what he was saying, starts with the sound and then he says and I want you to translate this, Allie. "But can I specify anything beyond the sound?" And then he quotes a friend of his saying, "It gives a sensation of meaning." Right, if I were to tell you watch out there's a bus coming, you wouldn't say, "Oh, that gives me a sensation of meaning. " You'd say, "That means something, I'm going to get out of the way!" Zoom. I saved your life, right? He's saying no, no, no. It gives a sensation of meaning but can I connect the words and make meaning? OK. Explain. Well, first it indicates that sound is primary and his reading of it or-- His interpretation of it. Perhaps more accurately in his listening to it. Close listening. Close listening. And that meaning making or interpretation is secondary in this case. So this is a moment in the course, a moment in the course. What's different? What's happened to the way we interpret? What's different about this approach? Well, what's different is that when we think about doing something, like let's say we're doing something like Shakespeare, Tennyson instead. We have a very specific kind of literary word for sound, for words that sound like they mean, like onomatopoeic words. And what he's saying is that we need to read every single word onomatopoeically, not in the sense that they, you know? He's certainly saying that and you're not wrong in the least. But let's go large. What is the difference? What is different about this interpretive approach than what we usually do? That it's the opposite of what we do. It's the opposite of what we do. Somebody else explained that, Dave? It's primarily concerned with form and then only after that it gets to content. This is what we what we have been naturalized to do for centuries really. But I mean some would argue that it's only been five or six centuries at most since we humans primarily, and certainly in the west, primarily took the descriptive or denotative or narrative meaning from language, and then later attended to the sounds of it. To the form of it, right? I mean if one had to generalize about the importance of this in our course it would be this: how we say what we say is as important as what we say, which is potentially offensive thing, right? But I don't think so. How we say what we say is as important as what we say. Indeed, Jackson Mac Low and other postmodern artists would say how we say what we say is more important than what we say. Indeed, how we say what we say is what we say. The first thing we should notice if we shift our attention is that. Then he says - I love this - "But can I specify anything beyond the sound?" It's exactly the opposite of what we are educated to do with language. We're educated to get the semantic meaning and then later, if there's time and if it's a poetry course, or a literature course, or an arts course, "Oh, you're taking another arts course." Then we start to think, "Well, maybe there's some kind of formal meaning." Maybe the form of the poem how the poem is said, or how the thing that is written is said affects meaning, this is completely reversed. OK. So then he says, and I quote, and I'm going to ask Amarice to translate this. He says, finally concluding about this amazing poem, Tender Buttons, A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass by Stein, he says, thinking about the phrase, "The difference is spreading." He says, "A meaning movement." He calls the poem a meaning movement. "From near sameness to greater and greater difference." Amarice, you're on. Okay. [laughter] What's going on here? No pressure, oh God. Well I think it's the idea of removing from the singular meaning that words seem to have, either when we read them immediately they just pop out to us and we get absorbed in this automatic translation of sign to meaning into the more musical qualities of language. So maybe taking them where-- an easier example, a piece of classical music doesn't have any overt meaning but we attribute images to it, an emotional quality. Sad or happy. And those things are analogous to the human voice. So here in his reading of it we saw that he placed a lot more emphasis on his intonation and in that way, each specific word has more meaning qualities, I guess, that are possibly attributed to it based on how we perform it. So we're really going to get to this when we turn to Stein 100, one of the Stein series, but we'll get back to that. One of the things your nice comments make me think is that painting and music has an advantage over us in poetry because no one sits there and listens to a piece of modern music and tries to understand what its semantic sense is. And they don't do it with painting. Jackson Pollock drips. Action painting. Nobody says, "Oh, that's obviously about a train heading to California." No they don't. They listen to the sound as it were, right? So "difference spreading" is finally taking Stein as indicative, as predictive of our Chapter Nine poets of contemporary poetics, right? He sees his work as a furthering of the distant difference spreading. He's a difference spreading descendent of Stein. He's going to do the furtherance of difference spreading. The differences spreading further. The words do connect. Meaning can be interpreted but that's not primarily. We go from sameness to difference. In 1999, Mac Low presented a paper at this Bard conference, Bard College conference that I mentioned and I was there and here's what one of the things that he said. Prior to, or maybe it was after reading one of the Stein series, or several of his Stein series poems, he said this. So I'm going to read what he said and I'm going to ask you to comment on it. There are two parts to it. "When I make sentences from the procedures outputs," and he's referring specifically to the Stein series but also generally to his work, "the reader or hearer must exercise initiative and imagination in finding or making these sentence sequences meaningful. Even when I modify the output minimally so that all the words have the forms, tenses, cases, numbers that Stein gave them, even when I modified them the reader or hearer has to mine, M-I-N-E, the individual sentences for meanings. OK Molly, I mean we've talked about this but here's your opportunity to summarize it. Well as meaning making in his arrangements of the words of the poems, the reader has to make something new out of what he's created. OK, Max. The reader must exercise initiative in imagination. We've talked about this before. Let's say it again. Well he's-- We just talked about how he's shifting where the evocation is, whether it's in the musicality of the language or whether it's in the meaning that we attribute to words, the denotation or the connotation and that's also a shift in how we read. It's being shifted back onto the reader that the process of meaning is a subjective one. This is where we were in chapter two. With Williams' open ended poems and Stein, we were there. But now even more so in chapter nine, the responsibility of the initiative and imagination of the reader is pretty much all we're left with. OK, he said one other thing in this excerpt from this talk at Bard College in 1999. I want to read it to you and see if it'll lead us into the poem. Stein 100, A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair. He talked about how he modified the results of this process, the Hartman program produced of the Stein text. What's the Stein text? What's the source text? Tender Buttons. All of Tender Buttons, the whole thing. What's the edition that it used? The first. There was some notes that she-- The first edition that was put online in the mid-90s by the Bartleby archive online on the Web. It's the edition we're using. Right. OK, so he puts that whole poem into Hartman and he uses selected strophes from the same poem as the seed text to generate the result. OK. He modifies the results. When the Hartman program produces the result he lightly, minimally modifies them. And he describes this modification in the Stein series as follows. "There are almost always ways in which I engage with contingency," OK? That's a phrase. "And in doing so," in doing this minimal modification, here it is, here's the claim. You ready Max, are you ready? "In doing so I am often not in charge of what happens while I do so. They often surprise me and they almost always give me pleasure and seem to give pleasure to others." OK, anyone. He engages when he modifies. This is not when he's sitting there watching the computer do its work. This is afterwards when he's lightly modified, he's being - oh my God - creative, right? He's doing something, right? When he modifies he's a) engaging with contingency, and b) not in charge of what happens when he does so. Who wants to take this on? Max? This. It seems like kind of a problematic statement. Or paradoxical. Or paradoxical. He's engaging. We can see what he does here with Stein 100, in that he's reinserted punctuation I think, right? And he's-- Done a little of that, he's done some smoothing out. And in the first few strophes, he says that that's pretty much how it came out of the program and I think you can actually follow the words, the paragraph in there if you read it closely. But he's reinserted some punctuation he's put... He's reinserted some sort of rhythm of speech actually. He's put in a colon, a feather table. That is to say a reckless gratitude. New idea, it is that there that means best and he's put back in some meaning. He's gone through and engaged with that contingency. OK, so he engages with contingency, which means what? Right. He's mixing a little bit of creativity with the uncreativity that's a characteristic of chapter nine of our contemporary poetics. And he implies that that mixture is all more or less the same non-egoistic work. That he's not in charge. So that sounds a little spooky and mysterious and magical, which is why you said it's paradoxical but I would insist that when we look at the poem we're going to realize that that's not it at all. So let's look at the poem. OK. So it's called Stein 100. It's 100 in the series and this is a poem that Mac Low read at that conference of Bard that I'm referring to in 1999, and I heard an early version of it and I have to say that when he finished reading it there was a gasp. It was like we were at the five spot. We all stopped breathing because it was beautiful in the Cagean sense and also in the traditional sense, it was lyrical and beautiful. And I went up to Mac Low afterwards and I was taken by how beautiful it was, and this was here-- he was characteristically uninterested in exclamations like this but I said, "Jackson, you made a beautiful poem." And do you know what he said? He said, "Did I?" Which says what? What did he mean by that Gnostic statement, Amarice? Well he was rejecting, I guess. He was rebuking me for assuming that the beauty had come from him. Exactly, which is the-- But he was also honored. Yeah. If he didn't make it who did? The beauty. The beauty that already is inherent to language. Oh, going that far back. Emily, if he didn't make it who did? Beauty, we're talking about. The author of that constraint. Which was him. Hartman's program, his constraint, his deterministic process and Stein. OK. So let me read some of the lines here and then I want you to respond. Remember the question is what did Jackson Mac Low do? And what did it feel like, and how could he say he's not in charge? And Dave, finally I want to turn to you and ask you what it feels like to be liberated from or dismissed from the impulse to read for meaning. OK, I'll read some parts of this. And we have a wonderful reading of Mac Low. A recording of it. I'm not sure it was made at that reading but it was certainly a beautiful reading. "More selection. Slighter intention. So much and guided holders garments are and arrangements, and why special? Reason is solidness. Their reddening is not to change that in such absurd surroundings, considering clearly a feather's large second, he is there. There that thing which smells, that whistles, that there is denial, difference, surfeit dated choices, everything trembling, imitation. Sugar and lard, there are something, sudden and shaming. There the remarkable witness made no more sentiment than blessing. Reasons, decline, is not a little grainy. No, not the same. Wishing the same is not quite the same as a different arrangement. What if it shows necessarily the whole thing there is shining. Is that anything? That which was hidden worried them." They asked that her speech be repeated and here are the last four lines of this seemingly lyric poem. Created partly by computers. "Summer light bears a likeness to justice. And the light is supposing the tension. That section has a resemblance to light. Is it a likeness of the justice chair?" And he read it more or less like that. So what do you draw from it? It's lyric sounds. Lyric poetry. What do you get from it? What do you do with it? Go. Dave. Well when you try to understand it, you get frustrated. So eventually you just try and... you just stop trying to understand and just go with the way it sounds. Go with the song and the lyrical quality-- You shift your attention to the lyricism of it. OK, so the question is what did Jackson Mac Low do? He claims that he engaged with contingency and that he was not in charge when he modified the result. Emily, what could he possibly be saying here? Why is it so beautiful? Is it beautiful? Yeah. "Summer light bears a likeness to justice," what a line. What's the difference between that line if it was written by Frost? Or Ashbury, more like Ashbury. Then by a computer program with a light minimal revising that made him feel he was not in charge of the lyricism, go. Even with Ashbury or Frost it would be a little sentimental, right? It would refer back to taste and when it refers to taste and sentiment and any active expression, it distanced itself from the sound, from that pure lyricism. And our impulse to want to know what he meant by, "Summer light bears a likeness to jus--" I love summer light. I like summer light when there's just a warmth on the back of my neck when I'm having breakfast out at a cafe in the Catskills and it's 72 degrees, and it's Sunday morning, and I'm getting a little personal here. And the light, the sun is on the back of my neck I'm wearing a T-shirt, and I'm sitting with people that I love and I'm just waiting for the second cup of coffee and the big pancakes that they make. I love the summer light and I think it bears a likeness to justice. And if someone, a poet wrote that I'd say, "Oh, you know what, it's--" I know it's traditional but that lyricism. I like it. But he didn't write it. "Did I?" "You made something beautiful." "Did I?" Emily, back to you, say more. You like the line. How addicted to authorship are you? Maybe not very. Maybe I can appreciate semantic meaning if it's accidental. Maybe it doesn't need to be intentional to signify to be meaningful. Maybe I can dispense with it entirely. Maybe that constraint-based, non-authorial, directed type of lyric does open up multiple dimensions of appreciation. And if society were more like that, so these utopian thinkers think, "Wow, that's the one I want to be in." Where beauty isn't an afterthought add-on to some delivery of meaning that was meant where somebody was trying to steer me in the direction of meaning what is supposed to be meant. I don't want to share the meaning, I want to share this. I want to share that summer light is a likeness to justice and that it's its lyricism that makes me feel that that's true. OK, so Molly, how are you feeling at this moment? We've got this weird, avant-garde, BS, computerised, non-authorial, zen thing that's happening. And I'm at the point of tears. I feel like it's almost more beautiful when lines like "summer light" accidentally makes sense. The beauty is in the accident-- It makes sense because they're beautiful or that they make sense because they came from Stein through a computer program. And because we want them to make sense to us. Going to go around and get some more final words on where we are. Amarice? I really enjoy that lyrical, musical quality to it. I think that right when we were talking about shifting the responsibility and the weight of intention, it no longer becomes, "Can we search out and find the singular meaning in a obscure, opaque text?" It's purely an active imagination and speculation. And how far we're willing to go and where we're willing to turn our attention. Allie? Just to go back to the issue of being the author of a piece of writing. I mean it's interesting in this context to compare authoring words and composing music. And you know I always wish that I had the ability to write music, but there's something about thinking about it in a musical sense that seems more like just taking notes, curating notes. And so when you apply that back to words-- As in musical notes? Right, yeah. So when you apply that back to words, maybe you can then think of language as also just taking pieces, because it seems like this was almost semi-conscious, with his comment on not being entirely in control or responsible for what he riffs off the contingencies. So taking words to just create more of an aural environment. Anna, final word? I just love being able to exist in a poem and exist in a world where I don't have to think about... If I don't have to primarily look at it closely and deconstruct semantics when I can just kind of sit there and just exist in the language-- What we used to call the art of it. Max? I'm skipping Molly and Dave because they had final words before but... I appreciate that he's striking a balance with engaging with contingencies, striking a balance between something that is generated in a completely removed way, without the ego that's generated as a procedure, and then reinserting himself. Or ourselves or some inflection of speech and meaning in striking that balance. It's... What's so striking about it to me is that the lyricism seems almost Ashburian at times and I think Stein, Ashbury, they seem such different styles and I guess I would say as much as I love Some Trees and what we did with Some Trees, it was so much work. Trying to understand what he meant by relationship and relation. I'm happy to have it but maybe this is the poem that we should be reading at a wedding. And not that one. Because, there's something about the wedding celebration of a relationship that's just happenstance. Let's face it. I mean we live in a society where the joining of two people is just... they just met. Randomer and randomer as time goes on. It seems to me that these lines are amazing. Summer light bears a likeness to justice and the light is supposing attention. That section has a resemblance to light. Is a likeness of the justice chair. I don't know what it means but I love how it sounds. And that's the happenstance that gets me up in the morning. And that's the supposed arbitrariness that allows me to feel that I'm really not in charge of what happens while I revise the world. It gives me that humility that I need and that I want to derive from art.
