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About syllables — I mean that nubby material edging up of consonants against airy vowelness in a line. How for me a line has to have a presence in this way — this sound structure I go for at first intuitively, then tweak by making small moves and shifts and adjustments so there is no sonic flattening within a line. It has to, for me, have this sort of full knobbly quality, or a torsion or a jaggedness or a swoony kind of movement from syllable to syllable, although now I seem to be exploring flatness as a sound quality. Are there kinds of flatness? You can see my vocabulary for describing it isn't theoretical. It's what gives a line body and movement within itself — the internal sound and alphabetic structure of a line as opposed to an emphasis on line break as the definitive energy of what a line could be. Entirely apart from conceptual presence or retinal image, all that. --Lisa Robertson (interview from Chicago Review)