5 ideas
The 'condition of secrecy' is the fact that we are inside the world we try to describe, so no one can step out and see it whole. Poetry does not reveal this secret by explaining it. It works from within the secrecy, sensing the whole through the partial connections that language makes.
Human language is not a tool standing apart from nature. It is one of the ways nature expresses itself, just as crystals, plants and cells do. The poet therefore does not invent meaning and impose it on the world. The poet lets the world's own structuring continue through words.
Lucretius compared atoms to letters: a small, finite set of elements, rearranged, produces endless different bodies, just as a few letters produce endless words. Seen this way, writing and the physical world run on the same combinatorial principle, so composing a poem imitates how matter makes forms.
An arbitrary formal constraint, such as a numerical sequence or alphabetical order, does not shut out the unforeseen. It creates a bounded space in which chance associations can appear that the writer's intention would never have produced. Pattern and randomness work as partners: the system generates occasions, and chance fills them with meaning.
In her 1981 poem 'alphabet', Christensen made each section begin with the next letter, from a to n. The number of lines in each section grows according to the Fibonacci sequence, the number series found in sunflower heads and shell spirals. The poem opens 'apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist' and piles up an inventory of things in the world, including threats such as the atom bomb. It is a concrete case of a mathematical natural pattern used as the engine of a poem.