SameOldShawn: I was going to ask if you were a musician at all

T.M. Wolf: I played the clarinet for a couple years in my grammar school's band. That's about the extent of it. But I understand at a spatial level what it's doing. I had the good fortune at the time to be in Cambridge at university, and they had a really good music library there. So I started looking up their scores, and spent time with John Cage scores, Earle Brown scores, just to get a feel for how they were using space on a page to represent the relationships between sounds

Once I saw something like that, I felt like that is a short step to, like, E. E. Cummings, which is like a short step to something else. The sizes of letters, their spacing on the page, they're all tools. All writing is, in my experience -- this is bold, and it's probably not entirely true -- I feel like it's a tool for expressing and it's a tool for thinking. And the way you use those tools not only allows you to express yourself and to think, but it also enforces some constraints on how you express yourself and how you think. So to the extent that you can limber up the tools a little bit, you may have the ability to express things and think about things in ways that you otherwise wouldn't that become productive for you, hopefully