Christian Bök

Christian Bök, FRSC (; born August 10, 1966 in Toronto, Canada) is a Canadian poet known for unusual and experimental works. He is the author of ''Eunoia'', which won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.

Life and work

He was born "Christian Book", but uses "Bök" as a pseudonym.

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 Darren Wershler-Henry. he teaches at the University of Calgary. As of 2022 He teaches at Charles Darwin University in Melbourne, Australia.

In 1994, Bök published ''Crystallography'', "a pataphysical encyclopaedia that misreads the language of poetics through the conceits of geology." The ''Village Voice'' said of it: "Bök's concise reflections on mirrors, fractals, stones, and ice diabolically change the way you think about language — his, yours — so that what begins as description suddenly seems indistinguishable from the thing itself."Ed Park,
Crystal Method
" ''Village Voice'', Dec. 16, 2003. ''Crystallography'' was reissued in 2003, and was nominated for a Gerald Lampert Award.

Bök is a sound poet and has performed an extremely condensed version of the "Ursonate" by Kurt Schwitters. He has created conceptual art, making artist's books from Rubik's Cubes and Lego bricks. He has also worked in science-fiction television by constructing artistic languages for Gene Roddenberry's '' Earth: Final Conflict'' and Peter Benchley's ''Amazon''.

Eunoia

Bök is most famous for ''Eunoia'' (2001), a book which took him seven years to write. ''Eunoia'' consists of univocalics: The book uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters. In the book's main part, each chapter used just a single vowel, producing sentences such as this: "Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech." Bök believes "his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language."

Edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and published by Coach House Books,
in 2001, ''Eunoia'' won the 2002 Griffin and sold 20,000 copies. Canongate published "Eunoia" in Britain in Oct. 2008. The book was also a bestseller there, reaching #8 on the Top 10 bestselling charts for the year.

The Xenotext experiment

'' The Xenotext'' is an ongoing work of BioArt which claims to be “the first example of ‘living poetry.’” The central experiment is twofold: first, a poem is encoded as a sequence of DNA which is then implanted into a viable bacterium; second, the bacterium reads this sequence of DNA and produces a protein that, according to the initial cipher, is also an intelligible poem. The final product, according to Bök in a 2007 interview, will include:

Bök is collaborating with laboratories at the University of Calgary, DNA 2.0, and the University of Wyoming to realize his design. In 2011, nine years after conceiving ''The Xenotext'' experiment, Bök announced the university’s labs had performed a successful test run of his “poetic cipher,” meaning that:

In 2015, ''The Xenotext: Book I'' was published. This first volume, consisting of meditations on science, poetry, human intervention, and myth, “sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself.”''The Xenotext: Book II'' remains forthcoming.

The Kazimir Effect

Since 2017, Bök has been working on a visual poetry project inspired by '' Suprematist Composition: White on White'' by Kazimir Malevich. This project culminated in the publication of a book titled ''The Kazimir Effect''
Penteract Press
2021), which was listed as one of th
Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year 2021

Recognition

''Eunoia'' won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002.

Bök's poem "Vowels" was used in the lyrics of a song on the EP ''A Quick Fix of Melancholy'' (2003) by the Norwegian band Ulver.

In 2006, Christian Bök and his work were the subject of an episode of the television series '' Heart of a Poet'', produced by Canadian filmmaker Maureen Judge.

On May 31, 2011, The BBC World Service broadcast Bök reading "The Xenotext."

Bibliography

* ''Crystallography''. Coach House (1994)
* ''Eunoia''. Coach House Books (2001) - winner of the 2002 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
* ''Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science''. Northwestern University Press (2001) - See ’Pataphysics
* ''The Xenotext (Book 1)''. Coach House Books (2015)
*''The Kazimir Effect.'' Penteract Press (2021) ISBN 978-1-913421-11-3

;As editor
* ''Ground Works: Avante-Garde for Thee'' (2003)

;Included in
* ''Poetry Plastique'' (2001)
* ''The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology : A Selection of the 2002 Shortlist'' (2002)

See also

* List of Canadian writers
* List of Canadian poets
* Concrete poetry
* Sound poetry

References

External links

Christian Bök pages on UbuWeb, including recordings, poetry, and essays

Christian Bök on Twitter

Griffin Poetry Prize biography

Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip

University of Calgary Faculty of English profile

Eunoia online book

"Bazaar of the Bizarre: The Book of Horrors"
- Christian Bök's first publication


on CBC Radio program ''And Sometimes Y'', episode 5, July 25, 2006

Podcasts recorded at the Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, on May 22, 2008
at University of Toronto Libraries
Records of Christian Bök are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bok, Christian
1966 births
Living people
York University alumni
Carleton University alumni
University of Calgary faculty
Writers from Toronto
20th-century Canadian poets
20th-century Canadian male writers
Canadian male poets
21st-century Canadian poets
21st-century Canadian male writers