Solsystem ★ Planet 9

was performed by yours truly on Thursday evening, January 21, 2016 at The Painted Note in downtown Salt Lake City for the Syzygy Cypher Poetry Cult:  the kickoff to a new weekly open mic curated by Aaron Beau Wolcott.   The idea is to reboot the open mic back to three sets, and no slam style scoring allowed. First round: original works, Second round: excerpts from our favorite books, third round: Back to original works.  Aaron encourages people not to just sit politely in silence but rather, to engage themselves with the speakers on the mic, letting them know what lines they love, or if they don't agree with certain sentiments. It's a reunion of dedicated creative writers on the level of the Dead Poet's Society, except I must say that it trumps that ideal by taking it one step further into a Living Poets Society right here in this thriving epicenter of cultural diversity hidden in the Blue Donut Hole.


My performance took about nine minutes presented en masse, my preferred delivery for this particular piece. There's an effect I want to preserve which involves engaging the listening audience. The 1st poem sets the conceptual stage. The 2nd poem establishes a lyrical preface. The 3rd is a reflection of a short story I'm currently writing, and provides a visceral and succinct description of our Earthly proximity to our nearest star system. It is the 4th poem--Tempest Redshift--in which I resolve the so-called Fermi Paradox to our satisfaction. The 5th poem--the centerpiece--plays out in eleven stanzas and is called True Sense, it's a condensed dictionary of elemental concepts, a scattershot crash course in the word's history (and thus the world's). There follows a small cluster of poems--four of them--the first of which dares to describe the sound of a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it, followed by three lyrical evocations compressed into short verse. My poem LEVITY becomes a mantra planted within the whole. The 8th poem RESCUELESS reaches closest to the firm ground upon which the listener's own feet are planted (and will be cut from my performance to bring my time down to seven minutes max, if necessary). The 9th poem leaps behind my parabolic vision and translates what I've seen into the dream of reality. There's one more in this cluster, the 10th poem HAMMOCK, originally dedicated to May Swenson and therefore eternally dedicated to her and by extension all  the poets and dreamers of the world. I end with the eleventh and final title piece, [SOLSYSTEM], which is a recitation of the bodies found within our solar system, paying extreme devotion to pronouncing the named moons of all the gas giants as well as describing the clusters of Trans-Neptunian Objects and various cosmic infusoria to be found swarming there, eventually ending in the four terrestrial planets and their three popular moons ultimately ending with the pronunciation of + THE SUN - .  A huge and heartfelt shout-out must go to Alex of Arrows Inward, a lo-fi ambient performance artist who drifted in from Cali recently. Thanks for daring to step up and collaborate with me by providing the perfect cosmic tonality for my reading of Planet 9. You really helped me take it to another level, giving it the perfect atmosphere it needed.  ★