Jackson Mac Low (1922 – December 8, 2004)[1] was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practitioner of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff.

An early affiliate of Fluxus[2] (he co-published An Anthology of Chance Operations) and stylistic progenitor[3] of the Language poets, Mac Low cultivated ties with an eclectic array of notable figures in the postwar American avant-garde, including Nam June Paik, Kathy Acker, Allen Ginsberg, and Arthur Russell.

[4] His work has been published in more than 90 anthologies and periodicals and read publicly, exhibited, performed, and broadcast in North and South America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

[5] The higher degree allowed Mac Low to support his artistic career as an instructor of English as a second language at New York University from 1966-1973 and as a reference book editor for many publishers, including Knopf, Funk & Wagnalls, Pantheon, Bantam, and Macmillan.

[6] From 1964 through 1980, Mac Low participated as a visual artist, composer, poet, and performer in the Annual Festivals of the Avant-Garde in New York.

In 1993, Mac Low and Anne Tardos gave a joint concert of their works for voices with prerecorded tapes at Experimental Intermedia, New York City.

[8] In 2012, Counterpath Press released 154 Forties, a collection of poems written and revised by Mac Low between 1990 and 2001, edited by Anne Tardos.

[10] In 2015, Chax Press released THE COMPLETE LIGHT POEMS: 1–60 [1] Archived March 1, 2015, at the Wayback Machine, edited by Anne Tardos and Michael O'Driscoll.

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.

"[12] Mac Low's interest in chance operations within poetry led him to adopt new experimentation techniques during his work on the Stein series.

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.

He regularly asserted that the author is not responsible for producing meaning, but rather creating the environment for the audience to extract a unique interpretation.

Works produced by chance allow the performers of the poem to have their own sense of determinism, which reflects Mac Low's own anarchist affiliations.

"[14]Within Mac Low's work, he disrupts subjectivity through the use of chance operations and the responsibility to extract and enact meaning falls on the role of the reader.