The American Composer John Cage invented what can only be described as a postmodern poetic form in his mesostics. These writings, though they started out as purely creative, eventually became poems generated by chance operations. The mesostics emerged as another product of Cage's exploration of indeterminacy. Some of Cage's works that included these poems are his Norton Lectures texts (also known as I-VI), Sixty-Two Mesostics Re: Merce Cunningham, and Roaratorio. Cage used chance operations for other forms of writing too. For example, his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) used subway train schedules and other sources to decide on typefaces, the number of sections per day, margins, and a myriad of other characteristics.

     In his early mesostics, Cage would simply write a word (usually a name) vertically down the page, with all the letters capitalized. Then, he would "fill in the blanks" and come up with a poem using the "spine" he had chosen. For Example (by the author):

Cage dubbed these poems "acrostics" until Norman O. Brown pointed out that acrostics had their "spine" letters on the edges of the words, not down the middle. Cage renamed the poems "Mesostics", a word derived from "Acrostic", but with an indication that the vertical aspect is in the middle of the word.

     According to Cage, in a "pure mesostic", there are no repeated lower case letters that match the previous or next upper-case letter in the poem. The words that surround the spine letters are taken from a selected source text read forwards, or by chance operations. The first letter to appear in any word is used to surround the corresponding spine letter. "Wing Words", or intermittent words placed in the text between spine words, may be selected by one's taste or through further chance operations. They must, however, obey the non-repeating letter rule.

     It should be noted that Cage was not the first to write poetry using these methods. Acrostic poems were a favorite of Lewis Carroll, and Jackson MacLow apparently used Cage's chance music techniques to write poetry as early as 1950. MacLow's works, however, include what he dubbed "Diastics" - the spine word begins on the first letter of the first line, then moves to the second letter of the second line, and so on.

     A critical view of such works might lead one to believe that these writings are meaningless, and simply a fast way of generating poetry quickly. The latter is true, but in reality they can be very complex. An examination of Cage's I-VI can be found in Marjorie Perloff's book Radical Artifice, where the author dissects the Norton Lectures Cage delievered and finds meaning within. Through his selection of source texts, Perloff writes, Cage was able to direct his writing to a particular subject matter. In many cases, meaning is discovered through the chance operations, and the writer of a mesostic can discover ideas of which he might not have been previously aware.

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