Christian Bök

Christian Bök makes poetry through demanding formal constraints and through exchanges between language, art and science. Born in Toronto in 1966, the Canadian poet and essayist established that approach in Crystallography, a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. Eunoia, published by Coach House Books in 2001, organizes its five main chapters around a different vowel; each chapter uses words containing only its assigned vowel. The title means beautiful thinking and is itself the shortest English word containing all five vowels. Eunoia received the 2002 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. Bök's long-running Xenotext project aims to encode verse in a bacterium so that the living cell produces a protein carrying a second poem. His practice also includes conceptual art, performances of Kurt Schwitters's sound poem Ursonate, and artificial languages created for television productions.