In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, each of which carried a phonograph record titled The Golden Record. The Record was meant to provide a glimpse of life on Earth through sounds and images. The Committee was led by Carl Sagan, the project’s Executive Director, and included Frank Drake (Technical Director), Ann Druyan (Creative Director), Timothy Ferris (Producer), Jon Lomberg (Designer), and Linda Salzman (Greetings Organizer). It was intended as a message in a bottle to extraterrestrials.
For a variety of reasons—including a prohibition against explicit content, fears of the Record being taken as a sign of aggression, legal and financial restrictions, and the myriad other reasons that one might surmise that a small, limited, insular committee of people would be rather limited in their experiences as well as selective about how they chose to portray humanity—the Record excluded a great deal regarding Earth and its inhabitants.
This manuscript imagines that, in 2020, NASA formed another Committee tasked with compiling the Record’s B-Sides, which were to be released as a separate album and meant to capture as much as possible of what the original Record elided, which the new Committee was invited to define however it wished based on its members’ lived experiences. This Committee was much larger and worked in anonymity, sharing their recommendations via messaging platforms and cloud storage systems. Each was known by their screen name, which was a randomly generated nonhuman like Sparrow or Elm. One person was designated with the role of filtering through the broader Committee’s recommendations and compiling them into a singular artifact. That person is the speaker of the book’s primary sequences.
The project explores the tyranny of the “royal we” in contrast with the pleasure of a hard-won solidarity-based collectivity, the paradoxes of working for revolutionary outcomes within late-capitalist structures, the many valences of the word “alien,” and the task of imagining a de-colonial world, among other topics. Some of the poems from this project have been published, although some of these have shifted significantly between these versions and the book versions. Those poems are listed on this page; for more complete citational information, see Words Online.
From the title sequence:
“Track One: The Canary Flies From One Mine to Another” (in a now out-of-circulation journal; it’s getting republished soon, so stay tuned or email me!)
“Track Two: Sounds of Human Labor”
“Track Three: Some Flowers That Have Died”
“Track Five: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”
“Track Six: The Interrogative Mood” (Project Muse)
“Track Seven: Love Poem with Prosopopoeia”
“Track Eight: Alienation of Affection” (Project Muse)
“Track Nine: God” (Project Muse)
“Track Ten: Metaphor” (Project Muse)
“Track Eleven, How Will You Begin?”
“Track Twenty-One: Ozymandias”
From a sequence of visual poems:
Soon forthcoming:
“Track One: The Canary Flies from One Mine to Another” (republication)
“Track Twelve: Icarus and Elowan”
“Track Nineteen: Wasting Disease”
“Signs of Life,” the book’s coda, which is in the form of a sonnet crown
Note: all of these poems have been revised to various degrees post-publication; the “Image” series in particular has been on a journey! If you’d ever like to chat about them or where they may be now, please don’t hesitate to use the contact form to be in touch. I’m also happy to speak to questions about process in any events or speaking engagements.