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What do you mean by 'surface meaning'? Do you mean a preemptive meaning put through the medium of transparent language or do you mean a meaning created by the arrangement of words as both would be surface meaning? Also what actually constitutes a 'random collection of words'? The so called random is rarely as random as it looks. All words have the capacity to sound interesting just as they all have the capacity to sound as dull as dishwater but words put together (phrases and pairs) lose their capacity and take on an effect which in its own turn has the capacity to sound interesting or be as dull as dishwater. It is also the case that the interesting effects can have a strange affect on the dull ones, and vice versa - these are colours - their use is a form of art. On 24 Jan 2018, at 12:05, David Lace wrote: > If a poem has no surface meaning (like one that is just made up of a more or less random collection of words that sound interesting—like much of what avantgarde poets do) then it would be impossible to paraphrase it.