Here are some quotes from the superb writer’s oeuvre:

“Form is not a fixture but an activity.”

“The work of art offers an experience of contradictions and incommensurabilities—these are much better than truths.”

“A work of art is a prophetic loan, drawn on fugitive premises; the artist acts on it, and, presumably, sustains some faith that others will do so too, or at least could.”

“Poetry plays with order, makes order of disorder, and disorder of order. It is unwilling to distinguish reality from veracity, and veracity from tale, and sees what each word thinks to see.”

“Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts rarely coalesce into images, rarely come to terms. They are transitions, transmutations, the endless radiating of denotation into relation.”

“Language gives structure to awareness. And in doing so it blurs, and perhaps even effaces, the distinction between subject and object, since language is neither, being intermediate between the two.”

“I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.”

“To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story.”

“Writing’s initial situation, its point of origin, is often character­ized and always complicated by opposing impulses in the writer and by a seeming dilemma that language creates and then cannot resolve. The writer experiences a conflict between a desire to sat­isfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a correspondingly open response to it. Curi­ously, the term inclusivity is applicable to both, though the connotative emphasis is different for each. The impulse to bounded­ness demands circumscription and that in turn requires that a dis­tinction be made between inside and outside, between the rele­vant and the (for the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrelevant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered access and response to the world (an encyclopedic impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out. The essential question here concerns the writer’s subject position.”

“But daily life and art occupy different space-times; a museum, a concert hall, a page of text, an art gallery are more likely to be experienced as refuges from daily life than as its venue.”

“Ambiguities everywhere should be collected as evidence of ambivalence.”

“A central activity of poetic language is formal. In being formal, in making form distinct, it opens—makes variousness and multiplicity and possibility articulate and clear. While failing in the attempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinc­tion, the integrity and separateness of things.”

“Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the dif­ferentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.”

“In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one per­ceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world—to close the gap between ourselves and things—and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our in­ability to do so.”

“Language itself is never in a state of rest. Its syntax can be as complex as thought. And the experience of using it, which in­cludes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active—both intellectually and emotionally. The progress of a line or sentence, or a series of lines or sen­tences, has spatial properties as well as temporal properties. The meaning of a word in its place derives both from the word’s lat­eral reach, its contacts with its neighbors in a statement, and from its reach through and out of the text into the outer world, the matrix of its contemporary and historical reference. The very idea of reference is spatial: over here is word, over there is thing, at which the word is shooting amiable love-arrows. Getting from the beginning to the end of a statement is simple movement; fol­lowing the connotative byways (on what Umberto Eco calls ‘in­ferential walks’) is complex or compound movement.”

“Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes. It makes us restless. As Francis Ponge puts it, ‘Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.’ Instead that center of gravity seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.”

“Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world. Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions. Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition.”

“The relationship of form, or the “constructive principle,” to the materials of the work (to its themes, the conceptual mass, but also to the words themselves) is the initial problem for the “open text,” one that faces each writing anew. Can form make the pri­mary chaos (the raw material, the unorganized impulse and in­formation, the uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? In my opinion, the answer is yes; that is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an activity.”

“The impasse, meanwhile, that is both language’s creative con­dition and its problem can be described as the disjuncture be­tween words and meaning, but at a particularly material level, one at which the writer is faced with the necessity of making for­mal decisions—devising an appropriate structure for the work, anticipating the constraints it will put into play, etc.—in the con­text of the ever-regenerating plenitude of language’s resources, in their infinite combinations. Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, di­rections, number, and velocities of a work’s motion. The mate­rial aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of lan­guage itself.”

“Writing’s initial situation, its point of origin, is often character­ized and always complicated by opposing impulses in the writer and by a seeming dilemma that language creates and then cannot resolve. The writer experiences a conflict between a desire to sat­isfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a correspondingly open response to it. Curi­ously, the term inclusivity is applicable to both, though the connotative emphasis is different for each. The impulse to bounded­ness demands circumscription and that in turn requires that a dis­tinction be made between inside and outside, between the rele­vant and the (for the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrelevant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered access and response to the world (an encyclopedic impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out. The essential question here concerns the writer’s subject position.”

“I can only begin a posteriori, by perceiving the world as vast and over­whelming; each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one’s ability to make distinctions. The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is form that provides an opening.”

“Write badly, write lies, pay attention constantly to the language around you. Write yourself into strange or dangerous places, write things you don’t understand. And always write in ways that make you excited to be writing. And I’d suggest that they keep asking themselves what they are doing and why they are doing it? What’s poetry? What do poets do? What’s fiction? What do fiction writers do? What’s ‘creative nonfiction’ (a strange category, since, for example, all scholarly writing—even term papers—can be said to be ‘creative nonfiction’)? What’s at stake in your writing—that’s a question with which all writers, regardless of gender and regardless of age, have to keep posing to themselves. There’s no possible final answer to those questions. Writing is hard and the task is endless. I’ve found that the same is true of academic life. Gertrude Stein once said that she abandoned her novel The Making of Americans because she realized that, after writing 1000 pages of what was to be a description of every kind of person there could be, she decided not to ‘go on with what was begun because after all I know I really do know that it can be done and if it can be done why do it.’ Living the life of a writer and and of a literary thinker can’t be done, and that, I think, is why I go on doing it.”

“Well, content is always there. One of the most interesting things about working directly out of language—getting inspired by the dictionary—is that words always do want to say something. Language always wants to shape itself and is restless in that way. I’m becoming very conscientious about the “content” of those shapes. I can’t allow a line or sentence to stand in my work if I can’t stand behind it in some way.”

“But of course everything is imminent in anything, with corresponding troubles and vexations, things in need of attention, bringing many bits that concern us, their pertinent worries and the accompanying worrying. Time gets intersected by the comings and goings of its dramatis personae: dog walker, truck driver, short order cook, oncology nurse, barista, florist, bank teller, dog walker, student, civil rights lawyer, electrician, figment of imagination. Real shadows are subject to the time of day, and to the position of the sun. What does one do with the excitement one feels when in one’s excitement one becomes exciting and excites awareness of the excitement and the exciting? And for how long can one do it?”

“It is only when differences emerge, making differentiation possible, that perception, observation, and making sense can occur. A world in the state of chaos is one that remains closed to us. Chaos, the state of undifferentiated everything, is a state of sameness. It is eventless. It’s swirling doesn’t happen. It is only by virtue of differences, that anything can occur at all.”

“If one equates fate with what happens, or even with all that happens, one can’t help but realize that one has an improviser’s experience of it. Improvisation has to do with being in time. And it has to do with taking one’s chances. In fact, one can’t take a chance outside of time; the whole concept of chance puts one inside a temporal framework. Improvisation consists of taking chances, i.e., entering the moment in relation to it — it’s about getting in time, being with it. To enter a moment in relation to it, one has to enter it with something. One is having a time with something — something one is in time with. That something is something that has come to be, it has occurred. Improvisation begins at the moment when something has just happened, which is to say, it doesn’t begin at the beginning. Nonetheless, it is always involved with the process of beginning—that is, of setting things in motion.”

“Differences then, are essential. They are what we all have in common, namely that we never have everything in common with anyone else. But differences have a strange ontological status. They are basic but not, strictly speaking, elemental They exist in and as the details of what is—as features of substantives, rather than as substantives themselves. They are, indeed, instances of insubstantiality, because they mark points of mutability. They keep things susceptible to events, they allow them to participate in what happens. Differences are evidence of incompleteness.”

“Today the clouds appear to be entering the world from one spot in the sky. If ideas are like air, you can’t steal them. Proves porous, held in. This morning I am enchanted by its grace.”