Gary Lutz, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” The Believer January 2009

This was my first real lesson about language — this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable. It was news to me that word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that it has cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround.