The subject came up again years later, this time in the context of another poet's response to my poems. She wanted to know why they couldn't be considered to be arbitrary arrangements of unrelated lines. This time I used a scientific analogy in my defense. I stated that like a chaotic system that appears random but that in reality is deterministic, obeying known or knowable laws, a poem might appear to be put together randomly and yet be--let's say--the (verbal) residue of a process that obeys laws, whether or not those laws are known to the poet.