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About The Xenotext: Book 1
Product Description "Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. From Publishers Weekly This book from experimental poet Bök (whose collection Eunoia won the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize) is a poetic diagram to be decoded and deciphered. Bök explores genetic encoding, immortality through text, conservation of meaning, and creation and destruction with virtuoso wordplay and composition that include acrostics, sonnets, catalogues, pastorals, and incantatory repetition, among other forms. Much of the text is translationâbetween genetic markers, from classical text to English, and through encapsulation of and commentary on both found and original poetry. Bök also provides detailed discussion of each section's form and aims in the "Vita Explicata" section, which is useful given that the purposes of individual sections can be obscure until they're given context. The whole of the collection is an intriguing and adroit display of poetic and literary capability, and it ties to a larger project that's even more ambitious: Bök's ongoing attempt to encode into an extremophile bacteriumâDeinococcus radioduransâa poem in DNA form designed to perpetuate and answer/continue itself in replication. The success of that project has yet to be determined, but the collection at least already succeeds in its aims, and is highly recommended. (Oct.) \n About the Author Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök teaches English at the University of Calgary.
