A Straight-up Poetry Pitch.

Yeah.

Here goes a backasswards way of trying to get poetry published, pitching it out on Substack. To my lovely fellow poets thinking ‘What the..?, Submit like everyone else, there’s a queue, you fuck..’ I get it.

But hear me out. One problem I have is that what I’ve written here is a heroic crown of sonnets, or sonnet redoublé, which is too short for all but the most left-field and blue moon random pamphlet subs. Even with a title page and epigraphs it’s 17/18 pages thereabouts. I could wait for the next one in-a-million pamphlet call outs that’ll consider something so short, or I could do what I’m doing here.

Faint heart never won fair maiden. Gah, the dreadfully important nonsense that is poetry, that it should come to this.

The other problem might be the subject matter, stained by stigma, and riddled with ridicule, that is, until fairly recently. You may be forgiven for not noticing that UFOs and ‘aliens’ are having a bit of a moment, sufficient to permit their institutional rebranding as UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and NHIs (Non-Human Intelligence). Arch-bozo Donald Trump has even waded into it with promises of revelations, no doubt to divert attention from the Epstein files.

What snagged my interest, and left me wondering why it was met with a cultural shrug, was the dread word uttered by senior intelligence whistle blower David Grusch in the US congress, when asked, “If we have recovered craft, do we have the bodies of the pilots?” To which he responded that yes, non-human biologics had been recovered. There have been three congressional hearings and multiple attempts at transparency legislation since the 2017 NYT article that set this current kerfuffle in motion.

I would urge anyone to avoid the rabbit hole that I threw myself into. At best it’s a bewildering hall of mirrors, with bad actors, a desperate counter intelligence operation losing its grip, a weird coterie of wannabe messiahs, grifters and charlatans. On the other hand, we could be on the brink of the most ontologically significant moment in all of human history. Steven Spielberg certainly seems to think so, his upcoming summer blockbuster, ‘Disclosure Day’ looks set to make our collective skin crawl with gnawing unease. Surely poetry could layer the confusion and ambiguity inherent in what’s referred to as the topic’s ‘high strangeness’ in ways no other form might be able to attempt. That was my brief.

It was the existential implications of such a phenomenon turning out to be more than the infamous swamp gas/weather balloon explanations offered as comfort, that became the threads I wanted to pull on. They draw in folklore, religious belief, creation myths and cargo cults, all set against a poorly understood structure of spacetime and quantum physics we’re only just beginning to comprehend. I thought of writing a simple sequence of poems, but soon realised that with any potential answer to any question came a hundred other questions, each, frankly, more troubling than the last.

No one, I would argue, has more artfully articulated the confusion of the human condition than the Bard himself, and if ever there was a theme that needed containing in some way it’s this one, so Shakespearean sonnets it had to be. Thankfully, my friend the prize-winning poet, Victoria Spires, pointed me in the direction of the heroic crown, a faraway form of which I knew little. One of the interesting features of the puzzle that is the heroic crown is the building towards not just the final master sonnet, but the master volta, which starts smouldering at the end of the 12th sonnet.

Will anyone buy this crazy shit? Well, concurrent with the media hoo-hah now circulating around the topic, there is a rapidly expanding, already vast ecosystem of UFO podcasters, some very good; sober, serious, academic, others, well...not so much. They have followers in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, with a ravenous appetite for anything and everything that speaks to the theme. All of them recycle each others’ content as part of the grim calculation that keeps the algorithm doing its arcane thing. This is the grubbiest part of my pitch, if someone publishes this, I’ll more than gladly hawk it round the UAP ‘community’ and talk block-time, proto-religions and distorted perception till the cows get beamed into the sky and mutilated. Lord knows there is so little literature that attempts to grapple with this beyond science fiction, something I would argue needs rectifying, while there’s still time.

We have no practical framework for understanding this, no ontological scaffolding on which to build a broader understanding of our place in a more bewildering reality than we dare contemplate, though shortly, I suspect, we’re going to have to make one. It seemed to me that once the question ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ has been answered, the next question, inevitably, has to be ‘What do they want?’ and for this reason I gave them the mic, hoping to consider or expose their motives. I find myself wondering if there is other poetry in which the narrator, unreliable or otherwise, is a non-divine/folkloric, non-human intelligence, far superior to our own

So that’s my pitch, do pass it round, if you like. I will be eternally grateful. It’s titled ‘Peeke-in-the-Crowne’. Even if it moulders forever unread on my desktop, I’m happy to say my exploration of the topic and its implications has been transformative, changing the way I perceive myself as a human in the universe and its wider ecology, the nature of consciousness and the limitations of our structures of understanding, at the most fundamental level. Anyhoo, if you want a feel for it, I enjoyed goofing around with short film on Capcut, so here’s one below.

And if you got this far, thanks. Abrazos.