Executive summary
Sun is a poem with ten words in it and seventy-two ways of saying them, one for each solar eclipse of Saros 126, a series that runs from 1179 to 2459.
The facts, briefly. The poem repairs a grid poem from 2011. It was prompted by The Wrong Eclipse, an open call for the total eclipse of 12 August 2026, and by Moons, Castles, Trees | AI Chronotopes, the exhibition its author had just curated for The Wrong Biennale.
It exists as a grid: three videos, a set of images, a 72-line Prolog program on GitHub and a Zenodo archive made on eclipse evening.
Forlaget Akse has published it twice in hardcover: on 7 November 2026 (ISBN 9788797786772) and on 11 November 2026 (ISBN 9788740991338).
Apertures
An aperture is a hole that something comes through. The poem came through three.
The first opened on 20 August 2024, on the Kalvebod Brygge waterfront in Copenhagen, when its author’s sense of time stuttered three times, about three seconds apart. He calls the stutters chronostases, and they sent him to Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope, in which time and place are one substance.
A work of his from 2025 takes its name from the Black ICE in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the barrier around data. His notes on the chronotope ask what the skin around language is made of, and how meaning gets through it.
The third was an eclipse, which is an aperture run backwards: the one hole in the sky gets a lid. The earliest printed picture of a camera obscura, from 1545, shows it pointed at an eclipse, so that the sun could be watched without being looked at. The poem puts apertures first in its grid.
Apparitions
The poem is haunted by an older one. In 2011 its author wrote a grid of nouns, verbs and adverbs that was meant to yield 216 sentences in each word order.
One noun, conscience, was singular in a column of plurals, and the grammar gave out after twelve. The grid lay there for fifteen years, and Sun is what walked back in.
A photograph of his, the Swedish coast seen from Hellerup with the Barsebäck reactor on the horizon, is titled The Time Is Out of Joint, after Hamlet by way of Derrida’s Specters of Marx.
Other things have appeared on cue. The exhibition that preceded the poem was called Moons, Castles, Trees.
Within a year a moon had stood in front of the sun, a castle had shown the work (Blackrock Castle Observatory, in Cork), and the poem had been rewritten as a program whose search tree has seventy-two leaves.
Auguries
An augur read the future from birds. At a total eclipse the birds fall silent and go to roost, so auguries thicken vertically is, among other things, sound field ornithology.
The poem attracts omens. Seventy-two is the atomic number of hafnium, which was identified in Copenhagen in 1923 and named after the city. One hundred and twenty-six is one of the magic numbers of nuclear physics, the neutron count that makes lead-208 so stable.
Then there are the books. Forlaget Akse published Sun: 72 Poems for 72 Solar Eclipses twice in November 2026, in hardcover, with different front covers and the contents in a different order.
| First edition | Second edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Published | 7 November 2026 | 11 November 2026 |
| Pages | 84 | 86 |
| Size | 12.5 × 19.6 × 1.1 cm | 15.5 × 23.5 × 1.1 cm |
| Weight | 152 g | 282 g |
| ISBN | 9788797786772 | 9788740991338 |
The first edition came out 87 days after the eclipse, and 87 opens every Danish ISBN.
The second came out 91 days after, thirteen weeks exactly. One ISBN ends in 72. The other ends in 1338, which is 6 × 223, and 223 lunar months separate each eclipse in a saros from the next.
Align
The whole work depends on one alignment: the number of sentences a grid can make, and the number of eclipses in a series.
The grid has three nouns (apertures, apparitions, auguries), three verbs (align, thicken, emerge) and four adverbs (rhythmically, vertically, recursively, now).
One of each makes a poem, and the adverb may stand first or last. That is 3 × 3 × 4 × 2, or seventy-two. Saros 126 has seventy-two eclipses. The total eclipse of 12 August 2026, the first to cross continental Europe since 1999, was the forty-eighth.
The alignment was not there at the start. The first published count was 432. On inspection the grid produced 54 sentences, which line up with nothing. A fourth adverb, now, brought the total to seventy-two, the way a last small turn of a lens brings an image sharp.
Thicken
Thicken is the word the poem stole. Bakhtin’s English translators chose it for what time does in a chronotope: it thickens, takes on flesh. It is one of only two Old English words in a grid otherwise built from Latin and Greek.
The exhibition that preceded the poem used that sentence as its epigraph. Its background image, White Layer, was fourteen digital layers made from a microscope photograph of a fleck of paint.
The fleck came from Degas’s Dancers Practising in the Foyer, a canvas its painter reworked for about thirty years and left up to fourteen coats deep.
Emerge
Emerge comes from a song. In Nick Cave’s “Cinnamon Horses” (2024) horses dance beneath strawberry moons, wander castle ruins and emerge in turpentine trees.
That gave the exhibition Moons, Castles, Trees | AI Chronotopes its title and its question: what happens when AI dances, strolls, is found?
The exhibition was part of the seventh Wrong Biennale. More than 800 artists submitted work and eight were chosen. It ran online from 1 November 2025 to 31 March 2026.
Then The Wrong announced The Wrong Eclipse, curated by David Quiles Guilló, and the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Mostar issued a call of its own.
The poem is what a curator made after a year on the other side of the table. It contains no machine-written text.
Every sentence it can make was fixed by hand in advance, and the machine’s only job is to find them.
Rhythmically
A saros is a rhythm. Every 223 lunar months, a little over eighteen years, the sun, the moon and the earth return to nearly the same arrangement and an eclipse repeats.
Saros 126 began beating in 1179 and stops in 2459. The word is older and stranger than the cycle: it comes from a Babylonian unit meaning 3,600, and it was Edmond Halley who attached it, by mistake, to eclipses.
The poem has a pulse of its own. Three short videos, Aperture, Apparition and Augury, each set one line over a fixed drone on A, at 110 hertz.
In a related work for MS-DOS, the letters of an old inscription choose harmonics of the same note, so that the text plays itself.
Vertically
The grid has a vertical. In Roman Jakobson’s scheme, which the 2011 poem borrowed, you choose a word by going down a column and build a sentence by going across.
Bakhtin’s chronotope is a crossing of axes as well. The Danish sentence attached to the work says that at 20:03 on 12 August 2026 an axis partly joined the sun and Copenhagen. The publisher’s name, Akse, means axis.
The purest vertical is in the code. In May 2026 the poem was written out in Prolog and published on GitHub, in a repository called triptych, under an MIT licence.
Prolog is given facts and searches downward through a tree of possibilities. For this poem the tree forks by 2, by 3, by 3 and by 4, and ends in seventy-two leaves.
The source says the poems are not generated but proved, and credits the idea to Louis Hjelmslev’s theory of language as pure relation.
The short program, saros.pl, is seventy-two lines long. Prolog dates from 1972. The repository has 75 commits, because something has to be out of line.
Recursively
A recursive thing contains itself. The book does: after the seventy-two poems it prints the complete program that produces them, so a reader holding the book holds the means of making its contents again.
Now
Now is the tenth word, the one that made the count come right, and the only one that needs you. The other nine can describe an eclipse in 1179 or in 2459. Now can only mean the moment it is read. Eighteen of the seventy-two poems contain it.
The work tried to seize one particular now. At 20:03 on eclipse evening, the maximum over Copenhagen, release v72 of the code was to be pushed to GitHub and archived by Zenodo with that minute on it.
Its author’s note from the next day reads: “I lost track of time.” The record (10.5281/zenodo.21908151) carries the right date and, by his account, the time 18:13:55 UTC, which is 20:13 in Copenhagen. Ten minutes late.
Or exactly on time, somewhere else. Blackrock Castle Observatory gave the eclipse maximum in Cork as 19:13 local time, which is 18:13 UTC. If the timestamp is as reported, the placeless poem chose a place after all, and it chose the castle.
Saros 126 has twenty-four eclipses left. The next is in 2044. There is a poem for it already, and a quarter of the candidates begin or end with now.
Key characteristics
- Ten words: three nouns, three verbs and four adverbs, read in two word orders.
- Seventy-two poems: one for each solar eclipse of Saros 126, from 1179 to 2459.
- A repaired poem: the grid revises a system poem from 2011 whose grammar held for only twelve sentences.
- No AI in the text: the work came out of an exhibition about AI, and its author states that none of the poems were produced by one.
- Six forms: a grid, three videos, a set of images, a Prolog program, a Zenodo archive and a book.
- Open source: the code carries an MIT licence and a DOI, and the book prints it in full.
- Two editions: the hardcover exists in two sizes, with different covers and a different order of contents.
- The late timestamp may be on time. The archive missed the Copenhagen maximum by ten minutes and appears to match the Cork maximum to the minute.
- The program is seventy-two lines long, and Prolog dates from 1972.
- One ISBN ends in 72. The other ends in 1338, which is 6 × 223, the number of lunar months in a saros.
- The first edition appeared 87 days after the eclipse, and 87 is the Danish group number in both ISBNs.
- The count was wrong twice before it was right: 432, then 54, then 72.
- Thicken comes from a translation. Bakhtin’s English translators chose it for what time does in a chronotope.
- The exhibition title came true. A moon stood in front of the sun, a castle showed the work, and the code turned out to be a tree with seventy-two leaves.
- Seventy-two is Copenhagen’s number. Hafnium, element 72, was identified there in 1923 and named after the city.
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