Mr. Mac Low. "Jackson Mac Low, a poet, composer and performance artist whose work reveled in what happens when the process of composition is left to carefully calibrated chance," is remembered in The New York Times by Margalit Fox. She writes: "The author of more than two dozen books of poetry, as well as musical compositions, plays and multimedia performance works, Mr. Mac Low was a seminal figure in the American experimentalist movement of the 1950s and after ... What united Mr. Mac Low's output was a fascination with randomness and with the limitless combinatorial possibilities of language.

"Mr. Mac Low's poems, like his musical compositions, did not so much blur the boundary between language and music as render it invisible. He prized words not simply for their meaning ... but as movable fragments of pure sound ... Sprung from their sentences, shuffled and reassembled, Mr. Mac Low's words became layered acoustic collages, meant to be performed aloud. Constantly shifting, always evolving, rarely the same twice, his poems laid bare the machinery of poetry-making itself ... He composed some poems by shuffling index cards containing words and phrases. For others he used random-number tables and, in later years, computer programs."

In 1999, Mr. Mac Low gave a lecture on his "ways of working." He said: They are almost always ways in which I engage with contingency, and in doing so I am often, to a large extent '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." One of his best-known works was a poem called "7.1.11.1.11.9.3!11.6.7!4.," (hope I got that right) which was based on a roll of the dice, rooted in the Hebrew Bible, and published with "two pages of instructions describing the various possibilities for reading it ... When read aloud by multiple performers, each going at a different pace, the poem evokes the wash of murmuring of Orthodox Jews at prayer." A founding member of "the avant-garde group Fluxus, and a frequent collaborator with John Cage, Jackson Mac Low was 82.

This edition of Cool News is dedicated to Mr. Don Dickison, a really good buddy of mine, and a true friend of Reveries.

Tim Manners, editor