Editing Jackson Mac Low (section)

=== Chance operations ===
Jackson Mac Low is known for using chance and experimentation in the production of his diastic poems. He engaged in projects that would extract words from the work of other poets and writers through a specific system he devised in order to produce a new poem. He would often extract these words from texts he was reading on the subway during his commutes. One such example is Mac Low's "Call Me Ishmael", developed from the source text ''[[Moby-Dick|Moby Dick]]'' by [[Herman Melville]].<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last=McHale |first=Brian |date=2000-03-01 |title=Poetry as Prosthesis |journal=Poetics Today |volume=21 |issue=1 |pages=1–32 |doi=10.1215/03335372-21-1-1 |s2cid=109928857 |issn=0333-5372|doi-access=free }}</ref> "Call Me Ishmael" is a phrase from "Loomings", the first chapter of the book. Mac Low moved chronologically through the book after finding the phrase extracted from the source text, "Call Me Ishmael," and allowing the first letter of each word in each stanza to spell out "Call Me Ishmael." Additionally, he played with the repetition of the letter "L" in the third and fourth word of each stanza by allowing the fourth word to repeat the third. For example, the poem starts with the line "Circulation. And long long", spelling out the first part of the source-text phrase, "Call."<ref name=":0" />

Mac Low's interest in chance operations within poetry led him to adopt new experimentation techniques during his work on the ''Stein'' series. He used ''[[A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates|A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates]]'', a book of random numbers developed to aid in the production of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, to randomly rearrange and rewrite text by [[Gertrude Stein]] in a series of poems. He originally discovered ''A Million Random Digits'' in 1958 and used it in work throughout his life.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=PERLOW |first=SETH |date=2015 |title=Reading by Chance: Jackson Mac Low and a Million Random Digits |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/43908416 |journal=Paideuma |volume=42 |pages=333–367 |issn=0090-5674 |jstor=43908416}}</ref> The ''Stein'' series, between 1998 and 2003, marks one of his final projects.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Spinosa |first=Dani |title=Anarchists in the academy: machines and free readers in experimental poetry |date=June 22, 2018 |publisher=University of Alberta |isbn=978-1-77212-405-7 |oclc=1083882356}}</ref>
Despite their mechanical nature, many of these chance poems open up space for sentimentality and delicate interpretation. One example of this is Jackson Mac Low's "Light Poems" that consisted of sentences randomly chosen from a chart documenting different kinds of light. In "32nd Light Poem: ''In Memorandum'' Paul Blackburn 9-10 October 1971," Mac Low uses this system of chance to pay respects to a late friend. The poem goes: "Let me choose the kinds of light/ to light the passing of my friend."<ref name=":2">{{Cite journal |last=Brown |first=Brandon |date=January 2017 |title=Music of Chance |journal=Art in America |volume=105 |issue=1 |pages=54–57 |via=Project MUSE}}</ref> Although the process appears mechanical, the poems themselves reveal grief and other emotions that appear to be at odds with the process by which they were developed.<ref name=":2" />