fiction.wikisort.org - Writer

Christian Bök, FRSC (/bʊk/; 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.

Bök reading from Eunoia at the University of York on May 19, 2011
Born	Christian Book (1966-08-10) August 10, 1966 (age 56) Toronto
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	Canadian
Education	B.A, M.A, PhD
Alma mater	Carleton University
Notable works	Eunoia Crystallography
Notable awards	Griffin Poetry Prize 2002

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. As of 2005^[update] he teaches at the University of Calgary. As of 2022 He teaches at Charles Darwin University in Melbourne, Australia. [1]

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."[2] Crystallography was reissued in 2003,[2] 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.[2] 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."[3] Bök believes "his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language."[4]

Edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and published by Coach House Books, in 2001, Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin and sold 20,000 copies.[5] Canongate published "Eunoia" in Britain in Oct. 2008.[6] The book was also a bestseller there, reaching #8 on the Top 10 bestselling charts for the year.[5]

The Xenotext experiment

The Xenotext is an ongoing work of BioArt which claims to be “the first example of ‘living poetry.’”[7] 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:

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. [8]

Bök is collaborating with laboratories at the University of Calgary, DNA 2.0, and the University of Wyoming to realize his design.[9] 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:

when implanted in the genome of [the] bacterium, [the] poem (which begins ‘any style of life/ is prim…’) does in fact cause the bacterium to write, in response, its own poem (which begins ‘the faery is rosy/ of glow…’). [10]

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.”[7]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 the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year 2021.

Recognition

Eunoia won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002.[11]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.[12]

On May 31, 2011, The BBC World Service broadcast Bök reading "The Xenotext."[13]

Bibliography

• Crystallography. Coach House (1994) ISBN 978-1-55245-119-9
• Eunoia. Coach House Books (2001) ISBN 1-55245-092-9 - winner of the 2002 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
• Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science. Northwestern University Press (2001) ISBN 978-0-8101-1876-8 - See ’Pataphysics
• The Xenotext (Book 1). Coach House Books (2015) ISBN 978-1-55245-321-6
• The Kazimir Effect. Penteract Press (2021) ISBN 978-1-913421-11-3

As editor

• Ground Works: Avante-Garde for Thee (2003) ISBN 978-0-88784-180-4

Included in

• Poetry Plastique (2001) ISBN 978-1-887123-51-8
• The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology : A Selection of the 2002 Shortlist (2002) ISBN 978-0-88784-676-2

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
• Christian Bök interview and reading 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
• Christian Bök at University of Toronto Libraries
• Records of Christian Bök are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books

На других языках

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- [en] Christian Bök

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[fr] Christian Bök

Christian Charles Bök né Christian Book, le 10 août 1966, à Toronto dans la province de l'Ontario (Canada), est un auteur, poète, photographe de l'avant-garde poétique[1]. Après avoir vécu dans la province de l'Alberta (Canada) où il enseignait la littérature anglaise à l'Université de Calgary[2], il est maintenant professeur à l'université Charles Darwin en Australie[3].

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