The experiment is always between, like a hinge, a preposition. "So much depends. . .," William Carlos Williams wrote, finding image in the structural relation between things. Recently, I was introduced as an "experimental poet." The word was uttered with disdain; I was damned with the faintest of praise. In the world of poetry, to be experimental is often taken to mean you have an aversion to form rather than an aversion to conformity. I began to give up the use of classical syntax, the logic of cause and effect, of an assumed relation between subject and object, after my sister died. The narrative as story had been ruptured once and for all; I wanted the gaps to show. When the gaps began to show, a new sense of possibility came forward in which mobile units were suspended in time and space. In the new syntactical dispensation, hinges or places of contact became an important location of meaning, as in musical composition and in much abstract art; meaning itself seemed to be the occasion of contingency. I began to perceive that the fragments among which we live are cause for celebration rather than lament.

"Against Perfection"