The Outer Limits

WIRED magazine just posted this story about a geneticist/poet who wants to encode his poetry into the DNA of a virus. Here's an excerpt:


"Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem."


Apparently, Mr. Bök is pretty out-there in experimental poetry. According to Wikipedia, "In [Eunoia's] main part, each chapter used just a single vowel, producing sentences such as this: “Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech.” ... In preparation for the novel, Bök read the dictionary a total of five times, compiling an exhaustive list of vocabulary..." Plus he worked on Gene Roddenberry's "Earth 2," so you know the man can't be right mentally. 


Aside from a gigantic ego (anybody wanna bet that poem's gonna blow chunks, whatever it winds up being?) and an approach to science that borders on Dr. Horrible, something about this just seems wrong. Like Island of Dr. Moreau wrong, where Marlon Brando splices the genes of animals with the world's most famous versifiers to produce BEAST-POETS! (Like Thundercats for English majors.)


Team leader Walt Whitmouse sings himself and celebrates himself with a nice Brie, while his on-again/off-again girlfriend Emily Duckinson works alongside him swimmingly, claiming there is no paddleboat like a book. The possibilities are endless: Sylvia Moth, Allen Gooseberg, X.J. Kenneldy. 


At any rate, I'm glad there are free-thinking people pushing the boundaries of contemporary poetics. My personal jury is out about pushing the boundaries of contemporary science, but we'll just let him reanimate a dead convict or two and see what happens. What could go wrong, really?

The Great Order of the Universe

Christian Bök

NOTES: “The Great Order of the Universe” is a response to the fiftieth anniversary of the LEGO patent. Using a conceptual strategy reminiscent of Sol LeWitt, the image enumerates every possible way of combining two LEGO bricks, each with eight pegs. The caption consists of two texts: the first, a translated paragraph from a volume by Democritus; the second, a transcribed paragraph from the patent by Godtfred Kirk Christiansen. The two paragraphs are perfect anagrams of each other.