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“art, by, contemplate, distribution, except, free, galleries, hexagonal, is, just, know, letters, melancholy, number, of, part, quite, railings, shafts, this, universe, variations, with, you, zero.”
(First appearances of words that begin with a chosen letter of the alphabet in an English translation of “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges….)
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Modern writers from diverse, avant-garde movements (including Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, etc.) have at times imitated the melancholy librarians of Babel, writing poetry by drawing lots or by rolling dice, doing so in order to explore the aesthetic potential of a discourse speaking on behalf of no authorial intention—a discourse not for communicating an expressive sensibility, but for generating an unexpected coincidence. Such poetry might include, for example, the “poésie découpé” of Tristan Tzara and the “cadavre exquis” of André Breton, the “mesostics” of John Cage and the “asymmetries” of Jackson Mac Low, the “cut-up novels” of William Burroughs and the “sadhu muffins” of Steve McCaffery. Even though these disparate, aesthetic exercises may stem from a variety of incompatible dispositions, be they nihilist (as is the case for Tzara and Burroughs), buddhist (as is the case for Cage and Mac Low), or leftwing (as is the case for Breton and McCaffery), all of these poets nevertheless suggest that, far from being an autotelic diversion, such writing circumvents the lyrical impulse of subjective expression in order to interrogate our linguistic investment in the poetic values of referentiality and expressiveness, of intentionality and productiveness. Such writing strives to provide an anarchistic alternative to the ideological constraints normally enforced by the capital economy of language.
Modern writers who deploy an aleatory strategy in their work may appear to do little more than emulate the random excess of irrational liberation, when in fact they confirm that, within language, such random excess is itself a sovereign necessity, an overriding requisite, which reveals the coincidental, if not conspiratory, order of words set free from the need to mean. Such poets accentuate the fact that, even though language may attempt to regulate the ephemeral interplay between the errancy of the arbitrary letter and the grammar of its mandatory syntax, the act of writing nevertheless finds itself traversed, inevitably and invariably, by the entropic dyslalia of chance-driven phenomena (mistakes, blunders, ruptures, hiatuses, glitches, etc.)—forces of both semiotic atomization and semantic dissipation, threatening always to relegate language to a dissonant continuum of chaos and noise. Such poets attempt to harness, if not to unleash, these errant forces of paragrammatic recombination, doing so in the hope that chance itself might lead the way automatically to a novel train of thought—one otherwise inaccessible to conscious, voluntary intention. Even though literary scholars have often neglected or dismissed this weird genre of writing because of its obdurate, if not hermetic, frivolity, such writing nevertheless formulates an, as yet, unexplored potential within the history of poetics.
Don’t forget James Merrill! Not to mention anyone who’s ever surprised themselves in a rhyming line, cf. AE Stallings’ discussions…