Christian Bök has been known to make things hard on himself. That’s his whole thing: His last book, Eunoia, notoriously includes five wordy chapters that each make use of one vowel only. With one chapter for every vowel – and vice versa – the book took Bök (pronounced Book) most of a decade to write, at the rate of several months a paragraph, four hours a day without fail, while the author worked two jobs and wrote his doctoral dissertation.
That Eunoia went on to become the bestselling book of Canadian poetry ever published only inspired Bök to set a higher bar for his next work, which is still very much in progress nine years later – and may well prove impossible to complete. He is struggling manfully to teach bugs to write poetry.
And not just any bugs, but those of the oldest, most obdurate, resistantly preliterate species conceivable:Deinococcus radiodurans, the world’s toughest living thing, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. “Conan the Bacterium,” according to whimsical biologists.
I don’t think I would be so enthusiastic about embarking on this idea if I knew it would take so long to do it. — Christian Bök
“You can burn it, freeze it, dry it out and it will continue to survive,” the poet enthuses on the telephone from Alberta, where he teaches at the University of Calgary. “It can survive in the vacuum of outer space. It can even survive a thousand times the dose of gamma radiation that would instantly kill a human being. So it’s a very tough bug.”
Deinococcus radiodurans may not be the most lyrical bacterium, but once he teaches it to store and even create poetry, Bök theorizes, it will never stop. “It could be on the planet when the sun explodes,” he says. “Effectively I’m trying to write a book that would last forever.”
Eunoia continues to do well in the meantime, so much so that Bök is travelling to Toronto this month to take part in the Open House Festival, where his “dazzling word games,” to quote The Times newspaper, will be set to music by Canadian rocker Dave Bidini as part of the festival’s Torn from the Pages program.
Bök's readings are unforgettable, a sensory barrage “with the impact of a Jimi Hendrix concert,” according to Bidini. Large in body and stentorian in voice, Bök “attacks the air, really bites the air,” the musician says. “There’s a lot of clavicle and rib cage. The words just shoot out of him.”
Whitman’s barbaric yawp translated into “univocal lipograms,” as Bök describes his favourite phrases – perhaps with a grunt or a squawk from one of the alien languages he invented for Hollywood impresarios Gene Roddenberry and Peter Benchley.
Today, Canada’s most popular poet is distinguished by his silence: the non-sound of his tortuous progress with Deinococcus, which he calls the Xenotext Project. “It’s a slow process,” he says. “I don’t think I would be so enthusiastic about embarking on this idea if I knew it would take so long to do it.”
Bök’s original inspiration was an experiment in which U.S. scientists translated song lyrics into genetic code and implanted them in various bacteria, retrieving them intact after several generations of reproduction. An article by physicist Paul Davies speculating about the use of such bugs as space travellers sealed the deal.
“We could image a civilization encoding information in genetic sequences that could be incorporated into spores and viruses,” the poet says, describing Davies’s idea. “And these spores and viruses would be transmitted into the interstellar void and survive and adapt to the various environments they encounter. And just sit and wait for a smart enough civilization to build computers fast enough to discover these messages and decipher them.”
Eureka. “I thought, Why wait? Why not be that civilization?”
