Carlo Rovelli, Italian physicist, says that “the world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.” Poet Diane Louie thinks of prose poems as little events. They are happening and happenings. They draw on experience, image, metaphor, and all the properties of language to create little worlds-in-motion—in motion being the operative words: spinning while orbiting, actively shifting our point of view.
More genus than hybrid species, prose poems can straddle the obvious limits and less-obvious liberties of perception. This active characteristic of spanning and connecting 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.
