The Prose Poem: Elsewhere at the End of the World
Of course, to be elsewhere is to be someplace other than here, other than nearby. It invokes a place, but the exact coordinates of this place are non-specific, non-local, even speculative or yet to be determined. Luckily, being elsewhere is not the same thing as being nowhere, and thus this state carries with it a set of geographical and topological ethics or responsibilities. Elsewhere constitutes the dream, the desire, and, in some respects, the vector. Elsewhere constitutes not only an evacuation, but also an eventual reterritorialization or repopulation. Note, however: due to its non-specific nature—its placed / placeable displacement—elsewhere can only ever constitute a becoming-place, a directionality. It constitutes magnitude or orientation, but never both. In this way, to be elsewhere is to be like the particles described by Heisenberg in his Uncertainty Principle—half-there, half-gone, now here, now there (not no-where).
Thus we are bound to uncertainty—to trailing sentences, defeated gestures, cataracts, tremors.
The state of being elsewhere involves, as I said, some ethical parameters. Indeed, in a collapsing / collapsible world, characterized by environmental instability, crisis, and even annihilation, being elsewhere may carry with it a grave set of consequences. On one hand, the directionality / desire inherent to non-specific displacement (my far-away one) could cultivate an attitude of neglect and escapism, a virtual reality undergirded by yearning. To be elsewhere is to be tropical, paradisiacal, extraterrestrial. Somewhere other than the slick Louisiana shore or the hurricane flooded subways of New York City. On the other hand, elsewhere, in “becoming,” (be / coming) in speeding-toward, necessarily must orient itself in terms of the here / where. Elsewhere contains within it geo-positional trace, a continuity, a recollection of data. One might conceptualize the exodus or diaspora that constitutes the movement elsewhere as responsible or immanently conscious of where it has been before. In that way, being elsewhere is being in a state of mourning, remembrance, recovery—ie: the mourning of environmental exiles / exiles from an environment / exiles in Babylon
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” Psalms 137
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari attempt (and fail (knowingly), thank god) to articulate the rhizome or the body without organs. Characterizing these loose, diffuse, tangential, and constantly intersecting / networked “structures” is a line of flight, a sense of becoming, a deterritorialization which results in proliferation, multiplicities, speed, polyvalence, torqueing, and systemic desire or jouissance. They articulate the pack, the swarm, the self-in-multeity: “so I too am in perpetual motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness.” Like the state of being elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari outline the “intermezzo” and always-adjacent, always-nearby-but-never-near nature of the rhizome. A rhizome, as they say, “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things.” A rhizome is processural, arcing, directional but not magnitudinal. A rhizome is not a tracing but a map, a tessellation—and, importantly, always a speculative or yet-defined / undefinable map. Where a tracing is linear, defined, narrative, a map is wide-open, undifferentiated, potential. A map “is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real,” and is not mimetic or derivative.
The state of being elsewhere is to be undifferentiated and potential. Elsewhere cannot be traced, because it always only ever occurs somewhere between points A and B, neither of which are truly known. More importantly, elsewhere constitutes a line-of-flight, where a line-of-flight is both rhizomatic, becoming, “anti-geneological”—propulsive and multiple. Elsewhere is all about speed. But it is a speeding-off into innumerable horizons, innumerable sunsets.
It is chaff (seeds?) in the wind.
The rhizome, fundamentally, is an organic shape. It is organic in the sense that it is dynamic, expansive, expressive—in a state of continuous oscillation, respiration. To articulate a rhizome is to articulate an environment, a system that is imminently fluctuating, adaptable, deterritorializing. If you stand in a forest, you will not see the “cycle,” the “pyramid,” or the “chain.” There are no linear tracings or traceables. Instead, you will inevitably see intersections, transversals, shearings, strange valences, correlatives, and loosely connective nodes. You will see lines of flight in every direction. You will see a map but not a law. In other words, a system—to be in a system, to be a part of a system—is to be elsewhere. That place, that attitude: elsewhere (being speculative and hyper-aware of your own tenuousness) may constitute the most ethical environmental stance, especially in a world of collapsing ecologies. Elsewhere is exploratory but never definitive. It intersects but never violently so. It desires but never violates. Elsewhere wishes, goes, but never arrives.
Likewise, Roy Scranton, in the New York Times writes: “[A] chorus of Jeremiahs predicts a radically transformed global climate forcing widespread upheaval — not possibly, not potentially, but inevitably. We have passed the point of no return. From the point of view of policy experts, climate scientists and national security officials, the question is no longer whether global warming exists or how we might stop it, but how we are going to deal with it.”
In other words, there is no future. There is no point B. For that matter, there was never a point A, either. We are late / too late. There is nowhere to go. There is only elsewhere, where we will never arrive.
We are going nowhere (elsewhere?) fast.
“Write, form a rhizome...”
Deleuze and Guattari issue this challenge, arguing that the book—a primary instantiation of literature—can be a splicing / binding or interpolation of pages, surfaces, sentences, plateaus, which constitute “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids orientation toward a culmination point or external end.” Writing elsewhere, in other words. I am mesmerized by the promises of this body-of-work, this readable body without organs. Deleuze and Guattari begin to write a rhizome, a plateau, a work that is truly multiple. Of course, most books, most literature as such often fumbles, fails to create a rhizome, or at least to acknowledge rhizomatic being / thinking. Indeed, we are surrounded by literature that insists on tracings, false linearities. Barthes might call these, at best, texts of pleasure, as opposed to texts of bliss. Let us the begin to write instead the rhizome. Let us begin to write elsewhere. Let us begin to speculate (through form) on multiplicities, plateaus, vernal pools, exoskeletons, biomes.
“Form a rhizome.” It is all very well to elaborate on the complexity of an ecosystem or of a rhizomatic structure, but it is another thing entirely to begin to make one. Of course, to some extent a rhizome is inherently ineffable and can only be half-seen, half-encountered (“how much further this order and subordination of living creatures may extend, above and below us,” - Pope). To this end—and at its best—the prose poem is a body without organs, a rhizome, a non-linear line-of-flight. To be sure, the prose poem is not the only rhizomatic shape possible in literature, but it manages to distill, compact, and compress a rhizomatic structure in an effective and speedy fashion. Because a prose poem is a map, because it is non-directional / “bodiless” / “disembodied” / a body, a syntax without organs, the prose poem can be a state of being elsewhere. In this way, then, the prose poem can function as an artifact most suited to contemporary ecological consciousness, where beginning to articulate the shape and structure of the systems, industries, and regimes in which we are implicated and of which we are a part is the only viable response.
To write elsewhere is to wander in the wilderness.
How does the prose poem distill / compress a rhizome or begin to compress into a rhizome? I will pursue here only one example of the rhizomatic structuration of a prose poem, acknowledging that there are many other instances of poetic multiplicity and poetic systems in multeity.
Like a rhizome, a prose poem may toggle and torque and warp along gaps, where a gap may function as a “dendrite” in a neural network, facilitating a dispersal and summary interpretation of information across a chasm. Again from Deleuze and Guattari: “The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each messages makes across these fissures, make a brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system.” A brain, in other words, is a map and not a tracing. A brain leaps, as it were, and radiates. It is a zone of interface, surface, or plateau, where a plateau, as previously stated, encompasses a line-of-flight. Likewise, a prose poem operates on a currency of syntactical, logical, and temporal gaps. For instance, in prose poems like those found in Lawn of Excluded Middle, Rosmarie Waldrop writes against the roominess of the lineated stanza (Italian, of course, for “room” or “stopping place”), opting instead for a radically open linguistic and syntactical configuration, often describing a language of spacelessness. A spaceless elsewehere. In reference to the stanza and its etymological relationship to the metaphor of house or room, she writes that “a space is too like a box, a container, a concept of form that isn’t mine.” In her essay/notebook “The Ground is the Only Figure,” Waldrop works to outline and nuance a new poetic spatiality, a ground or opening of field, in which the “field is a high energy construct of action, electromagnetic, a balance of forces, projective verse: what is, is no longer THINGS but what happens BETWEEN.” Again, we see the middle, betweenness, velocity without direction. The spaces elsewhere / the elsewhere spaces.
Indeed, Waldrop seems preoccupied by betweenness, in intervals, gaps, thresholds, associations. Or “microfissures,” to use the words of Deleuze and Guattari. Her poetry and theory of poetry primarily concern themselves with “relation rather than substance.” In other words, Waldrop is interested in association rather than accretion, surface rather than depth—in a rhizome instead of a tree, a tracing, a plumbing / probing. Merleau-Ponty: “Space is not the medium in which things are featured, but the means by or through which the position of things becomes possible.” In other words: the primacy of relation, position, posture—“par lequel” instead of “dans lequel,” as Merleau-Ponty’s original French reads. By or through which instead of in which. This same concept is played out syntactically, grammatically, and aesthetically in Waldrop’s response/aside to Alfred North Whitehead, who writes that “the little word and is a nest of ambiguity.” Against this, Waldrop writes: “It’s the words with ‘meaning’ that are the nests of ambiguity. The connectives are the only words that are absolutely clear! Pure relation.” Waldrop’s (prose) poetics of relationality necessarily must formulate at, over, and due to surfaces, especially surfaces initiated by a hyperspace of betweenness and syntactical gaps. As a prose poet, Waldrop is deeply disinterested in the roominess of the stanza and seeks instead a relational, surface-oriented poem that leaps, skips, stutters, and blooms, where blossoming (inflorescence) may occur along a horizontal X axis, eschewing the vertical Y.
A gap both demands and refuses to be crossed. While crossing a gap, you are neither here nor there. Instead, elsewhere, in motion, you waver / wobble.
While a gap may be said to establish a discontinuity, it also represents the possibility of the line-of-flight, a proliferation, a dissemination. To be sure, a gap is a non-linear space, a pot-hole, an absence of freeway, but it is more precise to recognize instead that a gap is multi-linear, multi-dimensional, polyvalent. A gap is radial, radiant.
An electron orbital is constituted not by precise, observable shells or rings. Rather, an orbital can only be represented speculatively, in bulbs, balloons. It can only represent where an electron might be as it modulates in and out of valences, appearing sometimes in two places at once, sometimes appearing not at all. An electron orbital does not demarcate a tracing, an ovoid body, but instead functions as a visualization of many lines-of-flight, many gaps. An orbital is elsewhere. Our atoms are elsewhere.
“Gap dynamics refers to the pattern of plant growth that occurs following the creation of a forest gap, a local area of natural disturbance that results in an opening in the canopy of a forest.”
A microclimate, a large branch breaking from a tree, then crashing to the forest floor. An increase in light as well as a change in moisture and wind.
A gap is available. A gap is both resistant and available. In this way, a gap constitutes—perhaps poignantly—a zone of exchange, communication, relationality. In a flat ontology, we relate across gaps. “There is no difference that does not make a difference.” We are constituted by gaps, along a plane, along many planes.
A gap is the opposite of collapse. A gap holds in abeyance. It is what makes a map. In the midst of the sixth great extinction, in the midst of environmental collapse, we must write / map (gap) / diagram. We must form a rhizome. To be elsewhere at the end of the world is neither to be everywhere nor is it to be nowhere.
Thank God: it is to be somewhere.
Jack be nimble / Jack be quick / Jack jump over the candle-stick. Jack—aloft, fleeing, in flight, over-leaping, substantiating a gap in which there is light / a candle-light.
Then, from Deleuze and Guattari:
“Be quick, even when standing still!”
Kylan Rice is co-editor and co-founder of likewise folio, an online poetry journal where he also hosts the interview podcast likewise audio and edits the chapbook press likewise books. Kylan has poetry published or forthcoming in Ghost Proposal, BROWN GOD, Similar:Peaks::, death hums, Bodega, Birdfeast, ILK Journal, Gigantic Sequins, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at Colorado State University.
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