Orthoteny: from a work in progress: “Flying Saucers”

I’m reminded today is the thirtieth anniversary of the premiere of The X-Files, which strikes me as a synchronicitously auspicious day to return here to the original motivation for this blog, presenting and developing the booklength poem I’ve been struggling over the way our scientists are said to be endlessly working on back-engineering those crashed flying saucers retrieved by their respective governments.

I don’t know if the poem I present today was the first I composed, but it stands as the right place to start, as Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting is the matrix for the utterance—itself inspired, by what unconscious processes at work in the mind of the journalist taking down Arnold’s story—of those fateful words that name a new mythology, a mythology for the Space Age, ‘flying saucers.’

The poem appears in the inaugural post of this blog, and I performed the poem to honour the launch of M. J. Banias The UFO People. The poem first appeared in print in my first full-length poetry book, Grand Gnostic Central. Here, I post a PDF and a new reading of the poem.