'The Sentence is a Lonely Place'

By Gary Lutz. From The Believer.

__ I soon succumbed to the notion that to imagine was to claim to know in advance an entirely forgettable outcome.
__ ... writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.
__ The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened
and grown and matured in each other’s company.

“acutely felt, clearly flat”:
There is more than a little agony in how, with just two little adjustments, felt has been diminished and transmogrified into flat, in how the richness of receptivity summed up in felt has been leveled into the thudding spiritlessness of flat.

“her lips stuck when she licked them to talk,”
A romance between two letters has been enacted in the sentence: there has been an amorous progression toward union.

“An accident isn’t necessarily ever over.”
The final syllable of the sentence is unstressed, and this unaccentedness deprives the sentence of a hard, clear-cut termination, much as the import of the sentence insists that an accident lacks definitive finality.

“… a single white wild blossom occurred under the forever stunted fig tree.…”