------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Xenotext Experiment: An Interview with Christian Bök
*Stephen Voyce *
/ York University/
svoyce@yorku.ca
(c) 2007 Stephen Voyce.
All rights reserved.
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1. Christian Bök was born on 10 August 1966 in Toronto, Canada. He
began writing seriously in his early twenties, while earning his
B.A. and M.A. degrees at Carleton University in Ottawa. He
returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in
English literature at York University, where he encountered a
burgeoning literary community that included Steve McCaffery,
Christopher Dewdney, and his good friend Darren Wershler-Henry.
Bök's published work includes two collections of poetry:
Crystallography (Coach House, 1994) and the best-selling Eunoia
(Coach House, 2001), the latter of which earned the Griffin Prize
for Poetry in 2002. He has also authored a critical study entitled
'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Northwestern
UP, 2002). Well regarded for his reading of Kurt Schwitters's
Ursonata, Bök has performed his sound poetry all over the world.
His conceptual artworks include Bibliomechanics, a set of poems
constructed out of Rubik's Cubes, and Ten Maps of Sardonic Wit, a
book created entirely from Lego bricks. His artistic endeavors
have showcased at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and with
the traveling text art exhibition, Metalogos. Bök has also
produced two artificial languages for science-fiction television
shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter
Benchley's Amazon. He currently resides in Calgary, Alberta, where
he teaches in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.
2. Bök's second collection of poems, Eunoia, has garnered
considerable attention for the author. The purpose of this
interview is to address the wider scope of his artistic practice
and to discuss his current project, The Xenotext Experiment, which
explores the intersection between poetry and biotechnology.
Between 11 May and 15 July 2006, Dr. Bök and I corresponded via
email.
3. Stephen Voyce: When did you first begin to write poetry? How would
you describe those initial efforts at writing verse?
4. Christian Bök: I began writing poetry in my late adolescence,
producing work inspired mostly by the likes of Michael Ondaatje,
Leonard Cohen, and Gwendolyn MacEwan. I published some of this
juvenilia, but I became convinced late in my undergraduate career
that, if I continued writing emotive, lyrical anecdotes, then I
was unlikely to make any important, epistemic contributions to the
history of poetry. I decided to become more experimental in my
practice only after I encountered the work of Steve McCaffery
during my graduate studies. I was surprised to discover that,
despite my literary training, none of my professors had ever
deigned to expose me to the "secret history" of the avant-garde
(what with its wonderful zoo of conceptual novelties and
linguistic anomalies). I realized then that, by trying to write
emotional anecdotes, I was striving to become the kind of poet
that I "should be" rather than the kind of poet that I "could be."
I decided then that I would dedicate my complete, literary
practice to nothing but a whole array of formalistic innovations.
5. SV: This assumption about what a poem "should be"--can you
elaborate on this statement? Why has the emotive lyric become
almost synonymous with poetry as such?
6. CB: Unlike other artists in other domains where avant-garde
practice is normative, poets have little incentive to range very
distantly outside the catechism of their own training--and because
they know very little of epistemological noteworthiness (since
they do not often specialize in other more challenging disciplines
beyond the field of the humanities), they tend to write about what
they do know: themselves, their own subjectivity. The idea that a
writer might conduct an analytical experiment with literature in
order to make unprecedented discoveries about the nature of
language itself seems largely foreign to most poets.
7. SV: That said, has the concept of formal innovation changed since
high modernism?
8. CB: Postmodern life has utterly recoded the avant-garde demand for
radical newness. Innovation in art no longer differs from the kind
of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify
advertisements for "improved" products; nevertheless, we have to
find a new way to contribute by generating a "surprise" (a term
that almost conforms to the cybernetic definition of
"information"). The future of poetry may no longer reside in the
standard lyricism of emotional anecdotes, but in other exploratory
procedures, some of which may seem entirely unpoetic, because they
work, not by expressing subjective thoughts, but by exploiting
unthinking machines, by colonizing unfamiliar lexicons, or by
simulating unliterary art forms.
9. SV: Many readers of contemporary poetry are familiar with Eunoia,
given its critical and commercial success. Your first collection
of poems, Crystallography, is a quite different book in many ways.
Comprised of odes, sound poems, anagrams, quasi-scientific
diagrams and indexes, the book demonstrates your interest in
combining poetic and non-poetic art forms. You describe it as a
"'pataphysical encyclopedia." Could you elaborate?
10. CB: Crystallography (my first book of poetry) attempts to put into
practice some of my theoretical suppositions about 'pataphysics.
Inspired by the etymology of the word "crystallography," such a
work represents an act of "lucid writing," which uses the lexicon
of geological science to misread the poetics of rhetorical
figures. Such lucid writing does not concern itself with the
transparent transmission of a message (so that, ironically, much
of the poetry might seem "opaque"); instead, lucid writing
concerns itself with the reflexive operation of its own process
(in a manner reminiscent of lucid dreaming). Such an act of
sciomancy borrows much of its crystalline sensibility from the
work of Jean Baudrillard, who argues that, for 'pataphysics, every
phenomenon exceeds its own containment within the paradigm of a
theoretical explanation. The crystal represents hyperbolic
objecthood--a thing impervious to analysis: captivating because it
is indifferent; frustrating because it is meaningless. The crystal
invites us to enter a poetic prison of surfaces without depth, a
prismatic labyrinth of mirrors that revolve into
themselves--hence, we lose ourselves when we gaze into this
crystal because it promises us answers to all the questions that
we exact from it, but instead it ensnares us viewers with even
more questions to be asked of it.
11. SV: Two responses: first, Alfred Jarry's concept of 'pataphysics
may require some explanation for readers unfamiliar with this
notion. Second, since Crystallography attempts to negotiate poetic
form through the conceit of geology, one might call it a "nature
poem." Is there an attempt to radically overhaul our notion of
this genre?
12. CB: 'Pataphysics is the "science of exceptions" imagined by Alfred
Jarry. 'Pataphysics occupies a cognitive interzone between
ratiocination and hallucination, appearing on the eve of
postmodernity at the very moment when science has begun to
question the paradigm of its own rational validity. 'Pataphysics
proposes a set of "imaginary solutions" for proposed problems,
proposing absurd axioms, for example, then arguing with rigor and
logic from these fundamentals. In contrast with metaphysics, which
has striven to apprehend the essence of reality itself and is thus
a kind of philosophy of the "as is," 'pataphysics is more like a
philosophy of the "as if," giving science itself permission to
dream--to fantasize, if you like. I argue that, if poetry cannot
oppose science by becoming its antonymic extreme, perhaps poetry
can oppose science by becoming its hyperbolic extreme, using
reason against itself in order to subvert not only pedantic
theories of absolute verity, but also romantic theories of
artistic genius. I think that my book on crystals does not portray
the nature of crystals, through either description or explanation,
so much as my book tries to emulate the formal system of crystals,
mimicking the processes inherent in their symmetries and their
branchings.
13. SV: Speaking of the book, you place considerable importance on its
material production. Typesetting a text replete with diagrams,
transparent paper, and letter-fractals requires a great deal of
precision. Did the composition of this text require you to learn
desktop publishing software?
Figure 1-1 Figure 1-2
*Figure 1: "S-Fractal" (left) and "Ruby" (right) *
Christian Bök, Crystallography 23, 26-7
Courtesy of Coach House Books
Figure 2-1 Figure 2-2
*Figure 2: "Key to Speleological Formations" *
Christian Bök, Crystallography 60-61
Courtesy of Coach House Books
Figure 3-1 Figure 3-2
*Figure 3: "The Cryometric Index" *
Christian Bök, Crystallography 114-15
Courtesy of Coach House Books
14. CB: Crystallography does require intensive labor to print, and I
have in fact stopped production of it upon discovering the
mis-registration of a single title-line, but in a book about the
"aesthetics of perfection," I think that this kind of attention to
detail is appropriate to the mandate of the work.
15. Gilles Deleuze and FÃ(c)lix Guattari have argued that each book must
lay itself out upon a super plane, a vast page, doing so both
extensively and expansively, without the internal closures of a
codex. The idea of the book, for me, has becoming something more
than a temporal sequence of words and pages. The book need no
longer wear the form of codices, scrolls, tablets, etc.--instead,
the book of the future might in fact become indistinguishable from
buildings, machinery, or even organisms. I think that the book is
itself a weird object that might not exist, except at the moment
of its reading--for until then the book always pretends to be
something else (a stack of paper, a piece of dÃ(c)cor, etc.). I want
each of my own books to burgeon into the world, like a horrible
parasite, exfoliating beyond itself, evolving along its own
trajectory, against the grain of truth and being.
16. SV: How then does Crystallography specifically operate beyond the
"closures" of a conventional book? For me, it eschews the notion
of a poetic "sequence" in favor of something closer to a
constellation, a book spatially organized. You write, if a crystal
is a mineral "jigsaw puzzle" that "assembles itself out of its own
constituent / disarray," then a "word is a bit of crystal in
formation" (12). Can this be applied to the book, too?
17. CB: Crystallography is definitely, definitely an extension of what
Eugen Gomringer in the world of visual poetry might call a
"constellation"--words arranged artfully into a rigorous structure
across the field of the page. My book consists of conceptual
fragments, all configured into a crystalline latticework of
correlated, figurative devices.
18. SV: Finally, in regards to your first book, I'd like to ask a
specific question about one of the poems, "Diamonds." It is one of
your few attempts at a lyric poem. Yet when you read it in Toronto
at the Art Bar Reading Series, many in the audience found your
"machine-like" performance somewhat disturbing, as if you had
eradicated any sentimentality from the text. Is there a conscious
attempt on your part to perform a lyric poem in this way?
19. CB: "Diamonds" consists of very tiny "opuscules" of words, all
arranged according to a lettristic constraint, in which each line
of each fragment contains the same number of characters (including
spaces). I have written this poem in order to demonstrate that a
"heartfelt" sentiment can arise spontaneously from a rule applied
with a rigorous, technical detachment. I have expressed no lyrical
content about my own biography at all within the poem, and my
"mechanical" performance of the poem probably arises, I think,
from the mechanical preciseness of its architecture.
Figure 4-1 Figure 4-2
*Figure 4: "Diamonds" (Excerpt)*
Christian Bök, Crystallography 76-77
Courtesy of Coach House Books
20. SV: I would like for us to turn to your second collection of
poems, Eunoia. Can you describe this text and what is now commonly
referred to as "constraint writing"? (Readers can find a flash
version of the poem's "Chapter E" by visiting Coach House Books
and an mp3
file of Bök reading the text in its entirety by visiting UbuWeb
.[1 <#foot1>])
Figure 5
*Figure 5: "Chapter I"*
Christian Bök, Eunoia 50
Courtesy of Coach House Books
21. CB: Eunoia (my second book of poetry) strives to extend the formal
rigor of "crystallinity" into the realm of linguistic
constraint--in this case, a univocal lipogram, in which each
chapter restricts itself to the use of a single vowel (the letter
A, appearing only in the first section; the letter E, appearing
only in the second section, etc.). Coined by Aristotle to describe
the mentality required to make a friend, the Greek word "eunoia"
is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, and
the word quite literally means "beautiful thinking." Eunoia has
received much fanfare, appearing for five weeks on the bestseller
list of The Globe and Mail after winning the Griffin Poetry Prize,
now worth $50,000. Eunoia responds directly to the legacy of
Oulipo (l'Ouvroir de LittÃ(c)rature Potentielle)--an avant-garde
coterie renowned for its experimentation with exaggerated,
formalistic rules. Oulipo rejects the metaphysical surrealism of
inspired insights in order to embrace what the poet Jacques
Roubaud calls a "mathematical surrealism"--a unique phylum of
'pataphysics, one that formulates methodical, if not scientific,
procedures for the production of literature, thereby conceiving of
difficult, potential problems that require a rigorous, imaginary
solution. Oulipo imposes arbitrary, but axiomatic, dicta upon the
writing process in order to evoke an unpredicted possibility from
these experimental restrictions. Such laborious exercises reveal
that, despite any instinct to the contrary, even the most
delimited behavior can nevertheless generate both artful liberty
and poetic license.
22. SV: The last time I checked, Eunoia was up to 20 print runs, and
"Chapter I" was recently featured in Harper's Magazine. Does it
surprise you that a book of poems--particularly one dubbed
"experimental"--has had so much popular success?
23. CB: I am surprised that my own work of experimental poetry has
enjoyed popular success, selling more than 20,000 copies at last
count, but this number still pales in comparison to the success of
other cultural artifacts in other art forms--so I still feel that
I have a very long way to go in order to boost the profile of
avant-garde poetry among a mainstream readership.
24. SV: So then the notion of a mainstream audience for innovative
poetry appeals to you?
25. CB: Poetry used to be the highest art form after music--but now,
because of its quaintness, poetry has become one of the artisanal
vocations (like needlepoint); so I would love to find ways to
rejuvenate the discipline.
26. SV: It should also be noted that Eunoia exhausts at least 98% of
univocalic words in English. With that in mind, can you describe
the process you adopted for composing this text?
27. CB: Writing Eunoia proved to be an arduous task. I read through
all three volumes of the Webster's Third International Unabridged
Dictionary, doing so five times in order to extract an extensive
lexicon of univocal words, each containing only one of the five
vowels. I could have automated this process, but I figured that
learning the software to write a program would probably take just
as long as the manual labor itself--so I simply got started on the
project. I arranged the words into parts of speech (noun, verb,
etc.); then I arranged these lists into topical categories
(creatures, foodstuff, etc.), so that I could determine what
stories the vowels could tell. I then spent six years, working
four or five hours every night after work, from about midnight on,
piecing together a five-chapter novel, doing so until I exhausted
this restricted vocabulary. I thought that the text would be
minimally comprehensible, but grammatically correct, and I was
surprised to discover many uncanny coincidences that induced
intimations of paranoia. I began to feel that language played host
to a conspiracy, almost as if these words were destined to be
arranged in this manner, lending themselves to no other task, but
this one, each vowel revealing an individual personality.
28. SV: You mention that among the various meanings of "eunoia,"
Aristotle defines it as the "mentality required to make a friend."
It is also a rarely used medical term to describe a state of
normal mental health. I find this amusing, since Eunoia seems to
have required near pathological compulsion to write. Intriguingly,
other constrained forms such as the sestina or even the sonnet
were from their beginnings linked thematically to obsessive love.
Can we talk about Eunoia in terms of (compulsive) desire?
29. CB: Eunoia suggests that, even under duress, language finds a way
to express its own compulsions. I like the fact that, despite the
constraints of the work, the text still finds a way to be not only
uncanny or sublime, but also ribald and sexual, writhing against
the chains of its apparent handicap. I feel that the vowels
themselves have conspired amongst themselves to speak on their own
behalf, using me as the agent of their compulsive expression.[2
<#foot2>]
30. SV: You mention earlier that you were putting together "a five
chapter novel." Do you think of this text as prose or poetry? If
one thinks of it as a prose poem, how does the sentence function
in Eunoia, in contrast, say, to Silliman's notion of the New Sentence?
31. CB: Eunoia uses prose for poetic effect. While Ron Silliman has
argued for writing in sentences that integrate only at the
grammatical, rather than the syllogistic, level, I have preferred
to write Eunoia in meaningful paragraphs, only because this
formality makes the constraint of the univocal lipogram far more
difficult to fulfill--and for this reason, each narrative in the
book ultimately conforms to the classic, generic rules of any
sensible anecdote, thereby entrenching a regular, capital economy
of meaning (an economy that its avant-garde constraints might have
otherwise challenged). A L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, like Silliman, for
example, might find this work a bit disappointing for its
inability to depart from the norms of grammatical, referential speech.
32. SV: Silliman speaks highly of Eunoia on his blog. He comments on
your "awesome ear," claiming that the "book's driving pleasure
lies in its author's commitment to the oldest authorial element
there is: a great passion for rigor."[3 <#foot3>] Granted, he does
not discuss the politics of representation as it pertains to
Eunoia. But this raises an interesting question: the Language
Poets insist that departure from referential speech in poetry is
necessary for an examination of the political uses of language.
Might constraint writing have a viable political function, albeit
perhaps a different sort?
33. CB: Oulipo has so far left unexplicit, if not unexplored, the
political potential of constraint itself, apparently preferring to
"constrain" such potential, confining it primarily to a poetic,
rather than a social, agenda. Oulipo in fact never deigns to make
explicit its political attitudes, even though the conceptual
foundation of "contrainte" (with all its liberatory intentions)
might lend itself easily to political agitation. We can easily
imagine using a constraint to expose some of the ideological
foundations of discourse itself (perhaps by exaggerating the
absurdist spectacle of arbitrary protocols in literature, making
grotesque their approved grammar, their censored content, their
repeated message, etc.). To fathom such rules supposedly
emancipates us from them, since we gain mastery over their unseen
potential, whereas to ignore such rules quarantines us in them,
since we fall servile to their covert intention.
34. SV: With so much emphasis on Eunoia's formal principles, it is
easy to forget that each chapter "conspires"--as you put it--to
tell its own story. Which is your favorite?
35. CB: When I read Eunoia in public, most people ask that I perform
excerpts from "Chapter U" because its scatalogical content "plays
well to the pit." Of all the stories, my favourite is certainly
"Chapter I" because, to me, it feels the most polished--consistent
in quality throughout the entire chapter. It is the one that
appears most effortless, both in its fulfillment of the formal
constraint and in its achievement of some poetic eloquence. In
other chapters, I always note a few paragraphs that, with another
year of effort, I might have improved, repairing minor flaws in
either style or voice.
36. SV: A final question about your second book: we have discussed the
text's principal constraint; yet, Eunoia operates according to
several subsidiary rules. For instance, each chapter must allude
self-reflexively to the act of writing, describe a feast, a
prurient debauch, a nautical journey, and a pastoral landscape.
Wherever possible, the text must adhere to syntactical
parallelism, minimize repetition, accent internal rhyme, and
exhaust at least 98% of all English univocalic words (as we
earlier discussed). You mention these subsidiary rules in a brief
essay, "The New Ennui," at the end of Eunoia. Yet, there are other
constraints you do not mention. For instance, any time a sentence
adheres to strict parallelism, nouns and verbs typically
correspond in the number of letters:
Figure 6
Here is another example:
Figure 7
In the second example, a "pagan skald" and a "papal cabal" both
consist of two-word phrases, each with five letters per word. "All
annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms" comprises a list of four
six-letter words, juxtaposing historical and political discourse
with literary and religious texts. The subsequent list of writers
alternates between four-letter and five-letter proper nouns,
arranged alliteratively by their first letters. Readers can find
several examples of numerical parallelism throughout the work.
When did you figure out you could add this constraint, and are
there other embedded rules you've kept a secret?
37. CB: At the back of my book, I do mention that the text owes some
of its euphony not only to internal, rhyming schemes, but also to
syntactical parallelism--but (as you have observed) I do not
mention that this parallelism appears at the level of phrases (in
both their letteral counts and their syllabic counts). I adhere to
these rules strictly throughout the book--and, believe me, this
constraint is difficult to maintain under the weight of all the
other restrictions. I have in fact adhered to many other
unmentioned constraints (most of which testify to my
obsessive-compulsive disorders)--but for your amusement, I can
mention one among them: in any paragraph, the initial words of the
sentences are either the same length or get progressively shorter
over the course of the paragraph--so that, for example, if I begin
a paragraph with the word "This," no sentence afterward can begin
with a word longer than four letters; and if I begin a subsequent
sentence with the word "Its," no sentence afterward can begin with
a word longer than three letters, etc. I shorten each of these
initial words over the course of the paragraph so that, for me,
the sentences "stack neatly"--and (as with all the other
constraints in the book), I have adhered strictly to this rule
too. I never highlight these other quirks and trivia of the text,
because many of the rules just reflect the minutiae of my own
poetic habits.
38. SV: At this point, I would like to discuss two additional aspects
of your artistic practice: sound poetry and visual art. Regarding
the first, you are renowned for your performance of Kurt
Schwitters's Ur Sonata and at one point you were likely the only
person in the world who had committed it to memory. (Readers can
find the poem online at Ubuweb
.) What is the function of
sound poetry today? How has the genre changed from, say, the
groundbreaking work of the 1970s by poets such as the Four
Horsemen, Henri Chopin, or Bob Cobbing?
39. CB: Sound poets from the 1960s and 1970s have often justified
their work by saying that such poetry allows the practitioner to
revert to a more primitive, if not more infantile, variety of
humanism. When such poets resort to a musical metaphor to explain
their work, they often cite jazz as the prime model for their own
form of verbal improv--but despite the importance of jazz in the
history of the avant-garde, such music seems like an outdated
paradigm for poetry. I think that most of the theories about sound
poems are too "phono-philic" or too "quasi-mystic" for my own
tastes as an intellectual, and I think that modern poetry may have
to adopt other updated, musical theories to express the hectic
tempos of our electrified environment.
40. SV: I take it you are thinking of Techno and other forms of
electronic music? What appeals to you about these (or other)
contemporary musical genres as opposed to Jazz?
41. CB: When asked about my taste in music, I usually respond (with
some embarrassment) that "I like music by machines--for machines."
The varied genres of electronica simply dramatize more accurately
our collective immersions into the hectic, social milieu of
technology. No human can perform a set of techno tracks without
assistance from a computer--and the sound of such music can
radically transform our heartbeats and our brainwaves in a manner
that almost seems pharmacological in its intensities.
42. SV: "By machines for machines"--in "The Piecemeal Bard is
Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics," you state,
along similar lines, that "we are probably the first generation of
poets who can reasonably expect to write literature for a machinic
audience of artificially intellectual peers."[4 <#foot4>] How
seriously should readers take this statement?
43. CB: Readers should take the statement seriously. Within the next
few decades, advances in computer engineering are going to produce
machines as sophisticated as the human brain--and before the end
of the century, we can fully expect to share our cultural activity
with a competing sentience.
44. SV: Sound poems such as "Motorized Razors" and "Mushroom Clouds"
string together recognizable words in suggestive, sometimes funny
or disturbing sequences. For instance, the latter poem features
references to the atomic bomb amid talk of pinball, pogo sticks,
and ping-pong games. (Listen to these two poems at Ubuweb
.[5 <#foot5>]) Also, both poems
were initially conceived as part of a larger project entitled The
Cyborg Opera. Are you still planning a long sound poem?
45. CB: The Cyborg Opera is supposed to be a kind of "spoken techno"
that emulates the robotic pulses heard everywhere in our daily
lives. The excerpt entitled "Mushroom Clouds" takes some of its
inspiration from the acoustic ambience of Super Mario Bros. by
Nintendo. The poem responds to the modern milieu of global terror
by recombining a large array of silly words from popular culture,
doing so purely for phonic effect in order to suggest that, under
the threat of atomic terror, life seems all the more cartoonish. I
am still amazed that, even though Japan is so far the only
casualty of nuclear warfare, the country has (weirdly enough)
counterattacked us, not with its own WMD, but with symbols of
cuteness, like Hello Kitties and manga girlies.
46. SV: You have created a number of conceptualist object-poems. I'm
hoping you will discuss two of them: Bibliomechanics and Ten Maps
of Sardonic Wit. Both, interestingly, were constructed using
plastic--which is an interesting material. Roland Barthes marveled
at "its quick-change artistry," having the capacity to "become
buckets as well as jewels" (97). Does it hold special significance
for you?
47. CB: Bibliomechanics consists of 27 Rubik's cubes, stacked together
into a block (3" x 3" x 3") so as to create a device reminiscent
of the writing-machine described by Jonathan Swift in The Voyage
to Laputa--"a project for improving speculative knowledge by
practical and mechanical operations." Every facet of these cubes
displays a white word printed in Futura on a black label so that,
when properly stacked together, the cubes create 18 separate
surfaces (6 exterior, 12 interior), each one of which becomes a
page that displays a readable sentence (81 words long). The reader
can, of course, scramble each cube so as to create a new text from
the vocabulary of the old text.
Figure 8
*Figure 8: Bibliomechanics*
Christian Bök
Twenty-seven Rubik's Cubes with printed lettering.
6-3/4" x 6-3/4" x 6-3/4"
Courtesy of the artist.
48. Ten Maps of Sardonic Wit is a book whose cover, spine, pages, and
words consist of nothing but thousands of Lego bricks, each one no
bigger than a tile, four pegs in size. Each page is a rectangular
plate of these pieces, three layers thick, and the surface of each
page depicts a black-and-white mosaic of words, spelling out a
single line of poetry. Each line is an anagram that exhaustively
permutes the fixed array of letters in the title, recombining them
into a coherent sequence of phrases about atoms and words. The
opening two lines, for example, are "atoms in space now drift/ on
a swift and epic storm." The letters of the poem become the
literary variants of molecular particles, and the book itself
consists of discrete, granular elements that can be dismantled and
recombined to form something else.
Ten Maps of Sardonic Wit
atoms in space now drift
on a swift and epic storm
soft wind can stir a poem
snow fits an optic dream
into a scant prism of dew
words spin a faint comet
some words in fact paint
two stars of an epic mind
manic words spit on fate
*Text from Ten Maps of Sardonic Wit, courtesy of the author. *
49. Plastic allows us to convert every object into a single, common
substance--a polymer, whose gewgaws are likely to outlast
civilization itself. Plastic has thus become one of the modern
tropes for a kind of pliable but durable mentality, in which
everyone shares the same thoughts, the same opinions--a mentality
in complete contrast, for example, to the "esemplastic"
imagination of the Romantics. Every idea now seems to have become
a kind of disposable convenience, no less pollutant than a
styrofoam cup. I suppose that poetry itself tries to "metabolize"
these persistent, linguistic forms of polypropylene in order to
recycle them into something new.
50. SV: I used to play with Lego when I was a kid. Was it difficult to
find pieces appropriate for creating a book?
51. CB: The Lego Corporation, upon request, provided all the elements
for the book (an object that consists of about 8500 pieces). Lego
bricks in fact have an almost Platonic perfection: getting a
package of 2000 small, white tiles, each one exactly the same, is
really like getting a big bag of protons.
52. SV: The trope of plasticity seems to promise simultaneously
glorious hybrids and garbage we can't get rid of. I detect the
same ambivalence in your response to the question posed about
innovation: art, as you put it, risks "the kind of manufactured
obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for
'improved' products."
53. CB: Art is really just an exalted species of garbage (stuff
leftover by a prior group from some other economic activity--and
when we haul off this junk in order to dispose of it, we just take
it to an incinerator called a museum).
54. SV: You mentioned earlier that poetic activity today might include
"colonizing unfamiliar lexicons." Many of your readers may be
unaware that you have created two alien languages for science
fiction television shows. First of all, why? And second, do these
projects inform your creative practice in any way?
55. CB: TV producers invited me to contribute to their shows, and
because I needed money, I agreed to design a couple of artificial,
linguistic repertoires. I thought that the job was fun, and it
added a couple of colorful lines to my CV. I would say that, at
the time, these jobs did inform my creative practice (insofar as I
felt that, for our culture, avant-garde poetry had become so
outlandish a practice that it now resembled an alien idiom with no
real home, except perhaps for the fantasyland of science fiction).
56. SV: At this point, I would like to shift our discussion to your
most recent work. I understand you are currently making plans to
convert a poem into genetic sequence? As I'm sure you already
know, members of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) have recently
turned to biotechnology as an artistic medium--and this has
created a great deal of controversy. First, I'd like you to
describe this field of art for those unfamiliar with it and
elaborate on what you believe are the social and political
implications of this practice. Then, can you explain how you would
integrate poetry, in particular, with biotechnology?
57. CB: Genetic engineering is going to be competing with computer
engineering for the brightest minds during the next decade, and I
expect that, during this century, these two disciplines are very
likely going to overlap and coalesce into one "superscience."
Artists need to participate in these domains of study, simply
because such technologies of information-processing are going to
become the medium for all forms of cultural expression. I am
currently trying to address these issues through an unorthodox
experiment in poetry.
58. "The Xenotext Experiment" is a literary exercise that explores the
aesthetic potential of genetics in the modern milieu--doing so in
order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S.
Burroughs, who has declared that "the word is now a virus." I am
proposing to address some of the sociological implications of
biotechnology by manufacturing a "xenotext"--a beautiful,
anomalous poem, whose "alien words" might subsist, like a harmless
parasite, inside the cell of another life-form.
59. Pak Chung Wong at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has
recently demonstrated that even now scientists might store data by
encoding sequences of textual information into sequences of
genetic nucleotides, thereby creating "messages" made from
DNA--messages that we can implant, like genes, inside bacterial
organisms. Wong has enciphered, for example, the lyrics to "It's a
Small World After All," storing this text as a plasmid of DNA
inside Deinococcus radiodurans--a bacterium resistant to
inhospitable environments.
60. Eduardo Kac has, likewise, used a genetic process of encipherment
for creative purposes in his artwork entitled "Genesis." Kac has
transformed the biblical sentence, "Let man have dominion over the
fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living
thing that moves upon the earth," encoding this phrase into a
strand of DNA, which he has then implanted into a microbe,
subjecting the germ to doses of ultraviolet irradiation so as to
cause mutations in the text itself as the microbe reproduces and
multiplies.
61. Paul Davies (a respected professor for SETI at the Australian
Centre for Astrobiology in Sydney) has even gone so far as to
propose an extravagant speculation, arguing that, if humans can
encode messages into DNA, then we may have to consider the
possibility that extraterrestrials more advanced than us might
have already tried to establish interplanetary communications by
enciphering messages into our own earthly genomes, using viruses,
for example, to act as small, cheap envoys, transmitting data
across the void.
62. These three thinkers have suggested the degree to which the
biochemistry of living things has become a potential substrate for
inscription. Not simply a "code" that governs both the development
of an organism and the maintenance of its function, the genome can
now become a "vector" for heretofore unimagined modes of artistic
innovation and cultural expression. In the future, genetics might
lend a possible, literary dimension to biology, granting every
geneticist the power to become a poet in the medium of life.
63. Stuart A. Kauffman (a MacArthur Fellow, who is now the iCore Chair
for the Institute of Biocomplexity and Informatics at the
University of Calgary) has agreed to lend me the expertise of his
lab during its free time so that I might compose an example of
such "living poetry." I am proposing to encode a short verse into
a sequence of DNA in order to implant it into a bacterium, after
which we plan to document the progress of our experiment for
publication. I also plan to make related artwork for subsequent
exhibition.
64. I foresee producing a poetic manual that showcases the text of the
poem, followed by an artfully designed monograph about the
experiment, including, for example, the chemical alphabet for the
cipher, the genetic sequence for the poetry, the schematics for
the protein, and even a photograph of the microbe, complete with
other apparati, such as charts, graphs, images, and essays, all
outlining our results. I want to include (at the end the book) a
slide with a sample of the germ for scientific inspection by the
public.
65. I am hoping to encipher my text and then integrate it into the
genome of the organism, doing so in such a way that, not only does
the organism become an archive for storing my poem, but moreover
the organism also becomes a machine for writing a poem. I am
hoping to design a text that, when implanted, does not injure the
organism, but that instead causes it to generate a protein--one
that, according to my cipher, is itself another text. I foresee
that, in the future, DNA might become yet another poetic medium.
66. I am hoping to "infect" the language of genetics with the "poetic
vectors" of its own discourse, doing so in order to extend poetry
itself beyond the formal limits of the book. I foresee that, as
poetry adapts to the millennial condition of such innovative
technology, a poem might soon resemble a weird genre of
science-fiction, and a poet might become a breed of technician
working in a linguistic laboratory. I am hoping that such a
project might, in fact, provoke debates about the future of
science and poetics.
67. SV: Are you familiar with the case against Steve Kurtz at
Buffalo?[6 <#foot6>]
68. CB: I am familiar with the rough circumstances of the case, as the
media have reported them, but I do not know the details of his
response to the allegations against him. I love the scholarship of
Critical Arts Ensemble, and I suspect that, by reacting
hysterically to an imagined, but baseless, threat of biological
terrorism, the authorities have found a convenient opportunity to
make an example of an artistic activist, punishing him for
otherwise legal forms of political critique.
69. SV: Do you consider the Xenotext Experiment an act of "artistic
activism"?
70. CB: The Xenotext Experiment is, at least so far, just an
experiment--with no overtly political overtones to it. I am not,
for example, offering any cautionary appraisals of
biotechnology--and I guess that, if there is any "activism" in
this work, the radical gesture might lie in my complaint that
despite science being our most important cultural activity as a
species, poets have ignored, if not rebuked, any attempt to engage
with it.
71. SV: This comment chimes with an observation you made earlier: that
poets rarely extend beyond the narrow scope of their own humanist
training (note that some would take exception to this remark!).
Why do you think there is a resistance to science in particular?
72. CB: Poets have generally forgotten that their art form, like
science, is an epistemological activity, in which practitioners
gain acclaim for making discoveries and innovations, generating
surprises about the paradigms of their discipline--and usually the
"manufacture" of such anomalies requires that innovators speculate
imaginatively in domains of knowledge outside the immediate
parameters of their expertise. Poets have historically regarded
the discourse of science as innately "unpoetic" (in part because
science regards "metaphor" itself as a barrier to its own
mathematization of truthfulness)--and because science is "hard,"
poets have found lots of reasons to justify their own ignorance of
the discipline, rather than engage with its discourses and
procedures as participating experimenters.
73. SV: How do you expect audiences of poetry will receive the project?
74. CB: Readers of poetry have become relatively conservative in their
expectations, so I expect that, in the short term, the project is
likely to be greeted with some bewilderment by poets, but
conceptual artists are probably going to be more receptive to the
project, recognizing themselves within this kind of novel
practice. I think that, in the long term, using DNA as a medium
for writing is going to become so commonplace an idea that my
project is going to seem ordinary by the technical standards of a
future poetry.
75. SV: We don't typically think about poetry as a communal artistic
practice, so it interests me that much of this work is
collaborative (by necessity). How have scientists responded to
your proposed plan of work?
76. CB: Stuart Kauffman, the geneticist, is my collaborator--and
because he is a MacArthur Fellow, he is already highly acclaimed
for his unorthodox genius. He has always responded to this project
with a kind of dubious glee. He is originally a graduate of the
humanities (with aspirations of becoming a poet himself), so he
appreciates the provocative character of my exercise, but of
course he wonders about its beneficial merits. He is, after all,
trying to use genetic algorithms to find a cure for cancer, so my
artistic use of his resources might seem like an amusing
distraction from his more serious work.
77. SV: I would like to end the interview with a question about your
own personal reading list. In your opinion, who among your
contemporaries are doing interesting work? Whose poetry are you
currently reading?
78. CB: Among my peers, Kenneth Goldsmith is still the man to
beat--but I take inspiration in varying degrees from a variety of
contemporary writers, most of whom take their cues from conceptual
artistry of one sort or another: Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein,
Kevin Davies, Jeff Derksen, Craig Dworkin, Dan Farrell, Steve
McCaffery, and probably most of all, my best friend Darren
Wershler-Henry (co-author of the recent book "Apostrophe"--an
awesome work of avant-garde poetry, written entirely by a machine
that scours the Internet for interesting phraseology). I have also
been very excited by the recent book entitled "Lemonhound" by the
feminist poet Sina Queyras.
79. SV: One more question, Christian: what is the story behind the
umlaut above the "o" in your last name?!
80. CB: "Book" (B, double-O, K) is in fact my birthname, not "Bök" (B,
O, K, with an umlaut), which is in fact my pseudonym. When people
ask me: "Are you /the/ Christian Bök," I usually respond by
saying: "No, that's the Bible." With my credentials, I must
sometimes endure the indignity of being called Dr. Book. With such
a moniker, I feel a minor sense of irony when declaring that the
concept of the "book" remains extremely important to my own
radical poetics, which has often striven to explode the formal
limits of the book (its serialized words, its stratified pages),
doing so as if in response to the formal demise of poetry at the
dawn of a new millennium.
/ English Department
York University
svoyce@yorku.ca /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. The Flash realization of Eunoia's "Chapter E" was
created by Brian Kim Stefans. Eunoia was recorded on 2 June 2002,
by Steve Venright in Toronto, Canada.
2 <#ref2>. Marjorie Perloff, in her latest book, provides an
astute reading of Eunoia in these terms. She observes that each
chapter exposes the "semantic overtones" of each vowel, so that,
indeed, the vowels seem to speak on their own behalf. See Perloff
205-26.
3 <#ref3>. Silliman's review of Eunoia appeared on his blog
(
), dated 9 April 2002.
4 <#ref4>. The full text of Bök's essay can be found online at
.
5 <#ref5>. Note that "Mushroom Clouds" comes directly after
"Motorized Razors" on the same mp3 file.
6 <#ref6>. On the morning of 11 May 2004, the artist Steve Kurtz
called 911 to report the death of his wife, who had succumbed to
heart failure. Upon entering the home, local law enforcement
encountered biological materials and lab equipment, which Kurtz
and other members of the Critical Arts Ensemble routinely use in
their art installations. Local authorities promptly called the
FBI, and Kurtz was briefly detained under terrorism legislation.
Although a grand jury later rejected charges of terrorism, the
associate professor at SUNY Buffalo was still charged with federal
criminal mail and wire fraud, and faces a possible twenty year
sentence if convicted.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1972.
Perloff, Marjorie. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy.
Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2004.