Mac Low is probably the most controversial of the many great poets of the legendary "New American Poetry" generation, those literary artists born in the '20s and weighted with names like Beat and Projective, New York School and San Francisco Renaissance. He has certainly been the hardest to assimilate into the predominantly humanist, self-expressive orientation of postwar poetry. Seen from the point of view of the visual and performing arts, Mac Low's work may appear less abrasive; and yet there is no visual or performing or conceptual artist whose word works approach the complexity, ingenuity, and density of Mac Low's, not even his many Fluxus associates, or his longtime comrade and instructor in the art of chance, John Cage. It is not that Mac Low's work is better than his contemporaries'–he himself rejected such forms of evaluation–but his work's significance for the development of poetry and for our understanding of verbal language is without parallel.