Janet Kuypers’ 9/21/17 “Seasons Change” Dripping Springs, TX “Thirsty Thursday” show

    Chicago poet and Austin resident Janet Kuypers was honored to join poets and musicians at the Dripping Springs City Hall, where she was asked to do a feature for Thirsty Thursday on September st 2017 (9/2/21, or 20170921).

    Included in her poetry show, she started with guitar from John while singing and performing her poem “True Happiness in the New Millennium (2017 Dripping Springs edit)”. In the remainder of her show, her poetry reading about all of the seasons as they change was accompanied by music recordings from the HA!Man of South Africa (including “big drops falling on my walk” and “the cold feeling of touch”, from his “Hotel Music”). The entire show was also accompanied by a random art generation on a computer screen of her images from around the world.

[tubepress mode=’playlist’ playlistValue=’PLYa-AZK78_hoQDsslIhPFa2uoETIBU3Ma’ ]

Seasons Change

    Before the show started she also released a chapbook of all of the short poems she read in this show, and this chapbook “Seasons Change” is still available online even during her reading, so anyone could (and can) download the chapbook titled “Seasons Change” as a PDF file for free any time.

Read the poems and songs from the from the “Seasons Change” show:

True Happiness in the New Millennium (2017 Dripping Springs edit)
Knew I Had to be Ready
Original Snowbirds” (in her book “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 show poems”), “Autumn (2017 Dripping Springs / Bahá’í Faith Center edit)
Marry you in Autumn
Sepia Leaves
Quell the Vibrancy
Seasons 1998”, and “Death Takes Many Forms
Quiver with no Home
Viewing the Woman in a 19th Century Photograph

Lanthanum, poem from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series, #57, La) from the Chicago poet Janet Kuypers

Lanthanum

Janet Kuypers

(poem from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series, #57, La)
6/27/14

When I went to the after party
of a recent Chicago live play,
an actor from the play
asked me if I was an actor.
I said no, I write,
I run a poetry open mic,
occasionally do features,
and the actor told me,
then you are an actor.

And my story has not
been produced as a play,
and directors aren’t
knocking down my doors
to offer me a starring role.
At my open mic
I applaud other readers,
collect money for features,
and although I perform
in a show sometimes,
a day or two after my show
I am quickly forgotten,
and I still,
otherwise,
seem to slip into the woodwork.

#

You know, I was thinking about it:
if you look at the Periodic Table,
you know elements are grouped
by weight and therefore by properties,
but there’s this block of elements
sticking out at the bottom of the Table.
It’s like scientists didn’t know
what to do with some of these elements,
so called them Lanthanides,
from the Greek word “lanthano”
(meaning “to escape notice”),
and then moved them out of the way
on the Periodic Table.

And that first element in the series
has the name from the series, Lanthanum,
and maybe it is like an actor
who appears in film after film
always portraying different roles
but not often taking the lead. ..
Lanthanum’s joined with metal elements
to make them stronger, because
even when added to lenses
or the accuracy of radio carbon dating,
everything is sharper, stronger and more accurate —
Lanthanum’s supporting role
makes everything stand proudly
in the lime light.

Dubnium, poem from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series by Chicgo poet Janet Kuypers

Dubnium

Janet Kuypers

from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series (#105, Db)
(8͏23͏14)

Over the years, the U.S. and Russia
have fought over all sorts of things —
thermo-nuclear bombs,
inter-continental ballistic missiles
to carry those bombs,
even getting men into space,
or winning the most Olympic medals,
or even… Making new chemical elements.

You may think of the Cold War
when I mention the U.S. and Russia,
oh, I’m sorry, the Soviet Union,
but you could probably also think
of the Transfermium Wars
where both countries spilled a lot of

ink

in an effort to come out the winner.

Because it was both Dubna in the USSR
and Berkeley California in the U.S.A.
that claimed the discovery of this element,
but after the Cold War, the IUPAC
(oh, don’t make me spell that out for you,
the International Union of Pure
and Applied Chemistry, the group
that decides the names for elements)
said that credit for this discovery
should be shared between the two.

But if the two countries no longer
battled over who discovered it first,
they could at least then argue
over the naming rights for the element…
The Soviets wanted to call it nielsbohrium
for the Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr.
The Americans wanted to call it hahnium
for the late German chemist Otto Hahn.
SO, American and Western Europeans
started calling the element hahnium,
while the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc
countries went on calling it nielsbohrium.

So the IUPAC gave the name unnilpentium
(one zero five, Unp) as a temporary name.
Though the two countries still disagreed
over the naming of this new element,
The IUPAC then decided on Dubnium,
to honor the Russian discovery location.
I think the only reason it got to be named
after Dubna is because America had
so many elements already named for them
(like berkelium, californium, americium),
and if the elements AROUND one oh five
(rutherfordium and seaborgium) are U.S.,
Dubnium can offset the American discoveries.

So yeah, even after all these decades
of competition and mistrust,
a third party had to come in — repeatedly —
to try to settle our squabbles,
kind of like the UN…

But now that we’re got the name
figured out for element one oh five,
maybe now we can learn about Dubnium,
right?
So I did a little research, and lo and behold,
scientists haven’t been able to figure
this element out either.
Melting point? Unknown.
Boiling point? Unknown.
Density? Unknown…
I guess that’s what we get
for battling with the Soviet Union
(well, okay, later Russia)
to try to create a highly radioactive metal
which doesn’t even occur in nature.
Only a few atoms have ever been made,
so I guess our “creation”
is for research interest only.

…But wait a minute, we just created
a radioactive element — should we worry
that if this spreads we’ll turn
into a radioactive planet?
Will our progenitors
be a radioactive species?

Well, that might sound like a thrill
for comic book guy, but Dubnium
is so unstable that it would decompose
so quickly that it’ll never affect humans.
And because of Dubnium’s half life
of half a minute (that’s short, by the way),
there’s no point in even worrying
about it’s affects on the environment either.
So as I said, sorry comic book guy,
but this won’t turn us
into radioactive people
or kill us by radiation…
Hmmm, maybe the United States
and Russia once worked
on trying to blow each other up
with nuclear bombs and missiles,
but when it came to the Dubnium battles
in the Transfermium Wars, maybe for once
we were both working at the same time
on something for science
that will only help us learn.