Mac Low's Thoreau: he gives exact attention. No added flavor: just it. His poetry sets us ecstatic, though he insists we speak it “soberly and clearly (as in serious conversation.)” Bells ring (Stein, Whitman): others will (Joyce, Ancient Chinese). He was ringing them before we were able to hear. Musician, he introduced poetry to orchestra without syntax. Poet, he “sets all well afloat.” That's why his poetry, even though it looks like it, is poetry.

Mac Low stands with John Cage as one of two major artists bringing systematic chance operations into our poetic and musical practice since the Second World War. The resulting work raises fundamental questions about the nature of poetry and the function of the poet as creator. For raising such and other questions, Mac Low like Cage has sometimes met with strong rejection and … has found less public recognition for work that's often sensed as “abstract” and that seems, by setting “chance” over “choice” in the making of poems, to act against the projection of personality usually associated with “the poet.” Still he's widely influential and recognized by many (Cage among them) as the principal experimental poet of his time.