In an interview with Pearl London in 1994, Frank Bidart responds:

When I write a poem I can always hear a voice, whether it's my voice or another character's. How do you get that thing on the page so that the reader can hear it? I found that when I set my poems down in the sort of usual ways, the voice wasn't there. One could not hear it -- hear what I heard in my head, or hear an equivalent. So I struggled and struggled and would retype pages hundreds of times in order to make that movement embody the voice I heard. I felt if I lost the voice I heard, I had lost the poem.
 
Now this is a very grand parallel, but when Stravinsky wrote "Sacre du Printemps" he said he heard things that he did not know how to write down. And that's why he kept changing the way it was set up in terms of bars -- because he heard things that the notation would not embody. I heard a voice, and when I changed language in order to make something that looked like good lines of poetry, the voice disappeared. It's almost a visual phenomenon -- I know when the page is working for me -- I have a kind of illusion that the voice is hovering like a quarter inch above the page.

 [...] There are the words and then there is a set of tensions, a subtext at war with those words. That illusion of hovering a quarter inch above the page has to do with feeling the voice in its relation to the words. Feeling, say, that if there's a dash followed by a semicolon there's a kind of gesture that is cut off and held in suspension. The words themselves, alone, don't do it.

Now, you could say, "Well they should do it." But I don't know how to do it that way. The only way I've ever found to do it is by creating a force... a set of dynamics on the page that embodies the subtext. And if you can put it together -- the signs on the page in this way, where you felt the war between the words and the tone or the gesture -- I think the page works.

-- from the book Poetry in Person, edited by Alexander Neubauer, p. 244-245

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2 photographs from a single roll of film that was put through an x-ray machine, forgotten and then later shot.

The folder in which I placed them on my desktop reads: deluezenakedoctober2.

This space is my dash followed by a semicolon.

Sometimes it hovers above the page.