it’s always Antipoetry Month at the Kootenay School of Writing … Christian BÖK
Sunday May 09 (talk)
W2 Storyeum
151 W. Cordova St
2:30 pm
Admission: 3 – 5$, sliding scale
presented by the Kootenay School of Writing @ W2
Christian Bök will give a talk on his ongoing project The Xenotext Experiment.
The Xenotext Experiment is an artistic exercise being undertaken by the poet who is proposing to create an example of “living poetry.” Bök plans to generate a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon he hopes to use a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space). He is composing this poem in such a way that, when translated into the gene and then integrated into the cell, the text nevertheless gets “expressed” by the organism, which, in response to the inserted, genetic material, begins to manufacture a viable, benign protein—a protein that, according to the original, chemical alphabet, is itself another text. He is, in effect, striving to engineer a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also a useable machine for writing a poem—a poem that can literally survive forever….
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Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. The Utne Reader has recently included Bök in its list of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Bök teaches English at the University of Calgary.
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