4. ‘Like blood in a dragonfly wing’

Abstract

The poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge explores the correspondences between human perception and the rhythms of elements that make up the cosmos, stretching in scale from the shape of specific molecules that plants may use to communicate to the astrophysics of stars. My reading of Berssenbrugge’s poetry is situated at the lower end of this range of scales, focusing on how Berssenbrugge envisions the microscales of minute biological processes as a material substrate that gives rise to the phenomenological experiences such as consciousness or even subjectivity. I argue that Berssenbrugge’s research-based poetics places her in dialogue with biologists, but also philosophers and historians of science, in a way that is persistently aligned with currents in these disciplines that have resisted the constraints of genetic determinism in favor of broader considerations of the complexities of gene expression, which view the organism as always in dialogue with its environment. In a fundamental way, this alignment with the complexities of gene expression understands the very materiality of the organisms as continuously arising and unfolding in time. As such, my reading argues that this interest in the unfolding nature of gene expression creates a fluid relationship between time and materiality in Berssenbrugge’s poetry, which is manifested through the process of morphogenesis or coming into form. In other words, the compositions of material entities in Berssenbrugge’s poetry are never given or stable but must continually materialize and re-materialize as the movement of time acquires the particularity of form, or as she puts it in Hello, the Roses: ‘Each appearance has a materiality more significant than we usually expect from bodies. Style, soul, is power through which matter is formed. Like historic change, a body can re-materialize in its chrysalis’ (16). As its focalizing point, the chapter addresses how Berssenbrugge’s poetics situates the morphogenetic relationship between time and matter within the minutia of molecular scales that populate biological bodies, or, as she writes in her collection Four Year Old Girl : ‘time enters, cell to cell of the line between yellow and bloodred in a petal’ (36).