Of Sentension

Sentences create and release tension. The novelistic tradition and its theorists, as well as those attempting to define the distinctions between poetry and prose, struggle to reduce this tension, which may be traced in punctuation, grammar, and prosody as much as in the more explicit reflections on the nature of the sentence and the line. The prose poem marks the interpenetration of line and sentence, their mutuality, even as it remains possible and necessary to distinguish them. In a selection of texts which include sentences from Jacques Derrida, Gertrude Stein, W. G. Sebald, Charles Baudelaire, and Lisa Robertson, this notion of sentension is traced as an effect of reading, with ramifications for attempts to think the relation of writing and thought.