Equations, like Opera Bufa, is a prose/poetry hybrid. The difference is simple: while Opera Bufa leans towards poetry and the poetic, setting up camp in an abstract, surrealistic realm of riffs and images which need not cohere in particular ways the way the novelistic prose does, Equations leans towards being straight prose, as it has a narrative structure built around precise representations of particular, complex human situations, without a hinge towards abstraction or surreal games (operas). The “I” in Equations is not lyric, but a concrete protagonist, moving through a decipherable world. Furthermore, Equations is built around a precise dialectic: the thesis arrives instantly, that sex and sexuality are what make us most human, the antithesis arrives when the protagonist meets and courts Jade, and the synthesis at the end of the book decides that the thesis is partially correct, no more. Yet, the Equations prose poems have just enough poetry in them to make the cadences and rhythms noticeably not what you might hear in a novelistic context:

Here’s my equation: sex is more human than everything else. Let me put
sex to the left of me and you to the right of me. In the interstices between me and sex, I have achieved my greatest consonance with humanity. In the interstices between me and you, I can (hopefully) give you a greater consonance with humanity, just by showing you the seams, the zippers, the ruffles, the cuffs, all the accoutrements that dress us up to be naked, in a text with its own nakedness.

The little catalogue (seams, zippers, ruffles, cuffs) gives a hint of the incantatory, as do the parallel structures and semi-chiasmus formations. Meanwhile, the fanciful world of Opera Bufa is free to do whirling dervish tricks that the Equations prose poems cannot, though it also loses solid grounding enough not to be able to hold, harness, and consolidate serious dialectic energies, imperatives, and motivations:

I am beginning an inventory. I am in
possession of songs. I am in possession of
labor, and love’s labors lost. I am capable of
experiencing Mini-Marts. I inhabit an operatic
landscape. I have loved a girl. I have also
loved a Maria. I am noticing a strange poverty
in richness. I am cleaning up the stage for this
to happen again. I am counting on scones to
butter themselves. I am haunted by remorse
for missed notes. I am nonetheless proud to
have escaped the flatted fifth, el Diablo en
musica. I am lucky because the Devil paid for
my stage props. I have torn up our contract. I
have contacted my attorney.

Joyous, comic, operatic noise for its own sake, and for its own amusement: that’s Opera Bufa. It’s light on its textual feet. Equations is heavier, and denser, steeped in prose necessities. Yet both are hybrids, in a new mode of textual hybridity. Sequences of prose poems have never been asked to carry this much cognitive depth before. As always, an educated audience are free to decide for themselves whether hybrids can maintain the same level of gravitas that straightforward poems, like the Apparition Poems and the Cheltenham Elegies do, and also what other hybrid forms might arise out of necessity as the century progresses.