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“thus can books that come I judge come infinite”
(By coincidence, the first nine words drawn at random, in this order, from the jumbled lexicon of all words in an English translation of “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges)
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Jean Baudrillard remarks that “[c]hance itself is a special effect; it assumes in imagination the perfection of the accident,” and ironically this “accidental thing is more meaningful […] than intelligible connections.” Accidents enchant us far more than any ordinary event that has arisen predictably from an expected cause, and nowhere does this principle seem more compelling than in modern poetry, where words in free play begin to fall, as if by destiny, into their own uncanny phrases, becoming all the more oracular when their message seems most unintentionally profound. Aleatory writings of this sort pose, what André Breton has called, “the problem of objective chance”—a kind of fortuitous occurrence, whose random nature nevertheless belies mysterious necessities. Breton has argued that poetics must negotiate the problem of this contradiction in language between unintended meanings and deliberate nonsense—a problem that the history of poetics has only now begun to analyze: “objective chance at this juncture is […] the region in which it is most worth our while to carry on our research.” While Breton expresses this sentiment during the heyday of Surrealism, his call for such systemic research still applies more than ever to modern poetry, written in a chaotic society, defined increasingly by statistical probability and other uncertainty principles….
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