A Subset of Chance

A Subset of Chance

by Martin Nakell

Martin Nakell positions a chance-generated image, Steve Roden’s complex painting that searches inward and outward, at the threshold of his long poem A Subset of Chance. This is a poem more full of words than most poems are, a narrative whose events are words, a geography whose places are words, a mandala where words shine, bright and particular, like gematria gems.

This floating jazz poem starts on the Nile, where the sun breeds crocodiles from mud, and moves on to Mesopotamia, then Irish prisons, Scalanovo’s port and the Côte d’Ivoire. By and by it ceases its restless wanderings and digs innnnn to time, to cosmic structure, to love.

But the words keep coming: chresard, faburden, golpol. Nakell explains the method behind his fine madness:

in order to derecinate this text that it might find the quest for form, it was composed via Gematria, a Medieval kabbalistic formula by which letters are translated into numbers. the letters of my hebrew name transformed by a given formula add up to 133. the poem contains 133 stanzas. each stanza is connected to the preceding and following stanza by a counting following this formula:

• choose a random word from a stanza
• look that word up in the Oxford English Dictionary
• count down from that word to the 133^rd word following
• use that 133^rd word in the next stanza
• choose a random word from the 2^nd stanza, etc.

So chance, number, or sheer vatic cunning structure this complex delivery system “come to bring language to a holy people.”

Martin Nakell “believes that the experience of art is energy — in literary art, an energy achieved by submitting language to turbulence and so discovering a new language for each work.” His writing has been published by Sun & Moon Press, Green Integer, Spuyten Duyvil, and Jawbone Press, among others.