Tag: Orthoteny: a work in progress

Orthoteny: from a work in progress: drafts and fragments

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Today, I end, for the time being, sharing cantos from Orthoteny, an epic-length poetic work dealing with “the myth of things seen in the skies.” Here are two drafts or fragments that may find their place in the final work, “Q’ Reveals the Real Secret Space Program” and “Ufo page discussion comment.”

Attentive readers will note the satirical tone of both, that the first poem is not from Q but Q’, and, depending on their social media experience, may well recognize the kind of thread the second poem pokes fun at.

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Orthoteny: from a work in progress: Magonian Latitudes

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Here, I share a poetic sequence from my second trade edition Ladonian Magnitudes, “Magonian Latitudes,” which concerns (among other things) those tales of ships in the skies from the Middle Ages that inspired at least the title for Jacques Vallée’s canonical Passport to Magonia. The sequence includes a version of a story that was to be repeated during the Mystery Airship wave of 1896/7, as well as reference to cave paintings thought by some to evidence alien visitation in prehistory, and broaderband thematic resonances of the these stories…

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Orthoteny: from a work in progress: from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery: April 18, 19, 21, 24, and 26

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Today, the penultimate instalment of cantos from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, dealing most notably with perhaps the first cattle mutilation story (a hoax!) and an even more provocative tale that echoes one from the Middle Ages. This last had me scratching my head for a while, until I happened upon the explanation, looking into those Medieval stories of ships in the skies.

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Orthoteny: from a work in progress: from On The Phantom Air Ship Mystery: April 17, Aurora

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Today, I share the next instalment from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, a retelling of the archetypal UFO crash in Aurora, Texas, 17 April 1897. Like the uncannily prophetic depiction of the alien abduction schema in the 1963 film The Haunted Palace, the story of the Aurora, Texas airship crash possesses many of the features of later, similar tales avant le lettre: the crash itself; the small, burnt body of its pilot; strange, heiroglyphic writing found on items in the wreckage; and the “burying” (metaphorically, the cover up) of the body and wreckage. However tall the tale (as Kevin Randle maintains), it is nevertheless canonical and haunts ufology to this day; Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris reference its similarities to the Trinity crash, the subject of their recent book, in all its versions…

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Orthoteny: from a work in progress: from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery: April 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16

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Today, the next instalment of cantos from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, here those dealing with five more days in April, 1897: further sightings, debunkings, newspaper articles, landings and encounters with naked, blond aliens decades in advance of George Adamski’s, an event reminiscent avant le lettre of the Maury Island incident, and even an aquatic sighting and encounter on Lake Erie…

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Orthoteny: from a work in progress: from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery: “The Phantom Airship”

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Here, the third instalment of pieces from Orthoteny, a booklength poem on “the myth of things seen in the sky.” The first can be read and heard here. The second is the opening section of the chapbook On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery. Following that Prelude is “The Phantom Airship,” another nine cantos that recount salient sightings and reactions, which, in their turn, lead into the momentous month of April, the topic of the poem’s next section(s).

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Orthoteny: from a work in progress: from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, “Prelude”

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One of the most complete, if unfinished, parts of the work-in-progress was composed quickly after the project was begun. I took extensive notes on the Phantom Airship wave of 1896/7 from all those UFO books I had obtained to that point and rendered them poetically. These texts are woven from certain leitmotifs: triads, the colour blue, and other recurrent details. It is this coherence I was eager to show, if not refer to explicitly.

On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery was originally published as the chapbook On the Mysterious Airships in 1995. I had the opportunity to perform the Prelude at multiple readings in Europe in the summer of 1996, the most memorable being at the Stromlinienklub in Munich before an audience of over 500.

It remains uncertain whether this part of the epic will remain the same in the completed work. It is, after all, and may perhaps remain, as the epigraph says, “…a blueprint, a mock-up, a prototype…”

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

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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.

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