In regarding formal conventions primarily as ‘rules’ to rebel against, the Professional Transgressor fails to see that conventions often become conventions precisely because of their power and utility, i.e., because of the paradoxical freedoms they permit the artist who understands how to use [not merely ‘obey’] them.
— http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs/Wallace-Prose_Poem.pdf David Foster Wallace, on the prose poem
