Kosmoautikon

Book excerpt: With the third volume of his project, Kosmoautikon: The Wound of Genesis is America’s epic poem. Mark Chandos presents his masterwork of the science fiction epic genre. Kosmoautikon tells the story of a future man after the exodus from Earth as humans depart to fill the galaxy with new man-like creatures, Homo Faustus. The author takes the reader on a magical journey through a new conception of the universe and into the heart of the human genome. From Kosmoautikon: What totems devise monuments of fixed veracity? Peering in a glass to read the genome, man and woman mark symbols, tapping at them with dull talons. My poem, permeable sieve, misprision to every new phylum. Thought, I test, is not fixed, but reformed in time, and what is time but divided thought? Disunion in my eye circles to the center. Since there is no perfect communication, ear to ear, there is art: my poem preserved as snarled and frozen imprint of my mind. And you, because death seems dithering, assert the gem-like crystal goblet . . . still solid. You, tapping against the cracking glass with talons. Mark Chandos’s essay, Modernism as Pangaea, introduces a bold new interpretation of modernism. He states that his “aim is to present a strong theory of poetry. Yet there can be no advance in Western poetry until the elephant in the room has been faced. Philosophy and poetry have failed to keep pace with the successes of scientism.” Kosmoautikon faces this challenge directly.