Sun

How can ten words measure thirteen centuries of celestial time? In Sun, Danish poet and artist Kasper Bergholt pairs structural linguistics with logic programming to build a verbal instrument for Saros 126, the series of seventy-two solar eclipses whose forty-eighth, a total eclipse, crossed Europe on 12 August 2026.

Drawing on the Copenhagen school of glossematics and the programming language Prolog, Sun states the rules of a closed system and lets those rules write the text.

Three nouns (apertures, auguries, apparitions), three verbs (align, thicken, emerge) and four adverbs (rhythmically, vertically, recursively, now) combine across two word orders. Fifty-four of the resulting lines could be read at any time; eighteen contain the word “now”, tying the cycle to the moment of reading.

The book prints the seventy-two poems, each dated to its eclipse, followed by the complete Prolog source code.