Carlo Rovelli, Italian physicist, says that “the world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.” I think of prose poems as little events. They are happening and happenings. They can draw on experience, image, metaphor and all the properties of language to create little worlds-in-motion: spinning while orbiting, actively shifting our point of view.
More genus than hybrid species, prose poems are able to engage and challenge inherited constraints: with the familiarity of prose they do not utilize line breaks, and therefore require alternative ways to signal breath and pause. With the agility of poems they press words and syntax past the surface of primary meaning, and can handle a broad melodic range, including meter and rhyme.
This active characteristic of spanning and connecting across both form and content is especially relevant in a time of cultural polarization. Marrying, even uneasily, the inquiries of science and spiritual longing can illuminate what they – and we – have in common: a desire to understand our presence in a universe that does not yield ultimate answers.