“Portions of the stanzas have been published and performed now and again here and there over the years until the work has become an underground — or at least unavailable — classic. The year the work was composed — 1960 — was one in which many artists were using ‘chance operations,’ the selection and arrangement of materials by randomizing techniques. But the structural techniques used in Mac Low’s stanzaic acrostic poems are both random and systematic, The linguistic units used in these structures vary in size from sentences to single words or even syllables. The words, phrases and other units are drawn from such widely different sources as newspapers, magazines, scientific treatises, and works on Vedanta and Buddhism.”
A collection of poems with components derived from a wide variety of sources, Erik Andersen is quoted to have said about this book:
“Concrete poetry (in the United States) makes a poor showing for itself with the results Mac Low reaches.”
Cloth-bound hardcover with dust jacket + a wrapper with a blurb by John Cage, with a black top edge, 24 x 16 cm, 426 pages, Barton Millerton Berlin 1971
ISBN: 0-87110-062-2
