Random poetry?: Reading chance, randomness and the non-compressible in Gertrude Stein and John Cage

Abstract

ABSTRACT The latter half of the twentieth century saw increasing interest in the production of aleatoric, ‘chance-determined’ texts. The writing of poetry outside of simplistically naturalised ‘intentional’ paradigms was not of course new, being common to the early century's ‘automatic writing’ and ancient oracular traditions alike; but poets writing in the twentieth century developed new anti-intentional methods under the sign of process philosophies and cybernetics, and mediated by new printing and computing technologies. The immediate reaction many of these texts evince is a sense of their ‘randomness’, their resistance to settled orders of symbol, rhetoric and signification, and to established protocols of reading. This essay asks what ‘randomness’ might mean in a poetic context. It considers the term's changing use across history, particularly in interaction with ‘chaos’, and outlines the information-theoretical definition of randomness as non-compressibility, drawing an analogy between this and the problem of poetry and paraphrase. How might this framework help in reading seemingly ‘random’ poetry? Taking examples from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and John Cage's Empty Words, the essay delineates some distinctions between the happenstantial, the procedural and the truly random in writing, and considers some consequences for the theory and practice of literary criticism.