Schwarz
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Who owns the words you're reading right now? if you're holding a copy of Bookforum in your hands, the law permits you to lend or sell it to whomever you like. If you're reading this article on the Internet, you are allowed to link to it, but are prohibited from duplicating it on your web site or chat room without permission. You are free to make copies of it for teaching purposes, but aren't allowed to sell those copies to your students without permission. A critic who misrepresents my ideas or uses some of my words to attack me in an article of his own is well within his rights to do so. But were I to fashion these pages into a work of collage art and sell it, my customer would be breaking the law if he altered it. Furthermore, were I to set these words to music, I'd receive royalties when it was played on the radio; the band performing it, however, would get nothing. In the end, the copyright to these words belongs to me, and I've given Bookforum the right to publish them. But even my ownership is limited. Unlike a house, which I may pass on to my heirs (and they to theirs), my copyright will expire seventy years after my death, and these words will enter the public domain, where anyone is free to use them. But those doodles you're drawing in the margins of this page? Have no fear: They belong entirely to you.
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.