Random Poetry 06

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dhcmrlchtdj
"distribution height closets may remote Library catalogue hardly to die just
dead hands claim me repeat Library centre hexagons the do jumbles
dreams hundred cannot matter rudimentary letter could have this did justified
dimensions hope corridors met remote Library could have the discover juggle
disappeared have cup mimic reduction Library comma have the delirium just
danger hexagons Combed m refutation languages correct hexagonal these define just"
(An acrostic text generated by taking the cryptogram cited in "The Library of Babel," and using this phrase to "read through" the entire story by Jorge Luis Borges)
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Random poetry almost fulfills the dream of Gilles Deleuze, who imagines an ideal game of chance, one whose rules find themselves generated by, and subjected to, chance itself. Such a game results in an aimless outcome so futile that we dismiss the game as a nonsensical dissipation of time—an atelic, if not asemic, activity, not unlike the daydreaming seen in modern, poetic theory: "only thought finds it possible to affirm all chance" for "[i]f one tries to play this game other than in thought, nothing happens, and if one tries to produce a result other than the work of art, nothing is produced"; hence, "[t]his game, which can only exist in thought and which has no other result than the work of art is also that by which thought and art […] disturb […] reality." Only the artisan and the thinker ever dare to play this game because, in it, "there is nothing but victories for those who know how […] to affirm and ramify chance, instead of dividing it in order to dominate it, in order to wager, in order to win."
The avant-garde has often bet its future upon such a "game" in the hope that chance itself might lead poetry away from rules of imitation (and the decline of their masters) into games of agitation (and the ecstasy of their players). One may write by chance in order to be amazed perhaps by what the dice have to say for themselves. The outrage expressed by academics when faced with the work of the aleatory writer almost mimics the outrage expressed by moralists when faced with the vice of the gambling addict. The critics who balk at such poetry refuse to take a chance, even though they speculate on literary legacies, trading in them like shares on a stock index in the casino of aesthetic tradition. Do not critics place a wager on a poet, hoping that posterity might celebrate the pedagogical clairvoyance of the first critic to herald the talent of a young genius? Do not critics play a game of astragalomancy, like a crapshoot, whose outcome remains, in foresight, uncertain, but in hindsight, mandatory?