folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem
What is a prose poem? What are its boundaries? Can a poem with very long lines (but separated by line breaks) be a prose poem? What about prose followed or preceded by a shorter line of “verse”? I trained in science and engineering, so I like definitions with clear demarcations (though they were a rare breed even in the fields I did my training). But those disciplines have, I think, informed the prose poems I write. Scientific prose is the form I am most familiar with, my bread-and-butter writing, my comfort blanket text; in fact, one of my deepest childhood memories is of reading a physical science textbook. Being guided by the textbook writers (whose names I never cared to discover) to perform acts of imagination with the tangible world, whether swelling cold water into ice or imagining crystals in cooling steel, was entrancing. I think the mental acts required by this sort of reading permeates poetry as well. Doesn’t a poem perform magic tricks on things conjured up in our imaginations? Don’t we readers expect poets to carry us through rapid, unexpected, conceptual leaps from image to image, sound to sound? There are, of course, many flavors of prose poems. But the prose poem is the form that, for me, most happily hybridizes the poetic with the technical, the scientific with the metaphysical.
Gospel
I am reading Mark. It is foreign to me. Like wanting a broken bridge to stand, reversing the irreversible. In the laboratory, I know what is irreversible. In the laboratory, I use an algorithm to find what is foreign. I usually program it to display a genetic sequence and where it doesn’t match. For instance:
THEBEGINNNNGOFTHEGOODNEWS
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
THEBEGINNINGOFTHEGOODNEUS
A civil war is a problem of determining the foreign. Two sides present competing versions. They eagerly distinguish themselves from each other, Heaven pulling away from Hell. There is a concept in mathematics of absolute value, which ignores which side a number is on. I imagine that if you took the absolute value of the two sides, they would be the same.
Can words from two languages have the same absolute value?
There was difficulty in finding the word for God in Chinese. Theos is the Greek term. A Chinese counterpart is shen. For example tudi shen means god of the grounds. Every hill and pond and puddle has one. But missionaries realized there was another word that meant one true divinity. This was the term that the Emperors decided to use for themselves, which was first in use long before Mark wrote a thing, which would be an unexpected knowledge of God.
Which would be unthinkable. Or was it unspeakable?
There was a man named Hong. Hong converted in the eighteen forties. He believed the Emperor did the unspeakable by calling himself by the name of God. He started a civil war, twenty million died. They died in the same productive decade that Emily Dickinson wrote some of my favorite poems. There is a pain – so utter – / It swallows substance up – Until recently, I visited the regions destroyed by war, which are now the richest in China.
I often reread Mark.
Mark reminds me of Euripides’s The Bacchae. I can read one thinking I read the other. In both a god disguises himself as a man. He comes to earth. He enters an indifferent city. A mocking crown is put around his head. He climbs a hill and is hoisted onto wood and branches. He dies in an unspeakable way. He dies in an unspeakable way. His mother does an unthinkable miracle. His mother is the instrument of his death. Thus a new religion is begun. Thus the unspeakable will of God is done.
DIONYSUS:
You who are so desperately eager
to see those things you should not look upon,
so keen to chase what you should not pursue[1]—
I do the unspeakable in the laboratory. Laboratory animals purchased and kept in a facility. The kind I use are mus musculus or mice. They translate science from my mind into the living. At the end of an experiment, I euthanize what is left. Many methods are available. But they changed the protocols recently. Now you no longer need to put your hand into the cage to perform the irreversible, to be sure the procedure worked this time. To put your hand into the unspeakable wound, to be sure this time.
Angelo Mao is a biomedical scientist. His first book of poems is Abattoir (Burnside Review Press, 2021). His poetry and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Lana Turner, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He is also a poetry editor for DIALOGIST.
