Name: DH@Guelph Presents... Christian Bök: The Making of the Xenotext
Start: 2025-11-10T16:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-11-10T17:30:00-05:00
Location: ImprovLab

$DH@Guelph Presents... Christian B\u00f6k: The Making of the Xenotext$

Christian Bök presents The Xenotext, a 25-year project to create a work of "living poetry," embodied in the genome of a deathless bacterium.
About this Event

THE MAKING OF THE XENOTEXT

Christian Bök has been labouring for 25 years to create a poem, called "The Xenotext," a work of "living poetry," embodied in the genome of a deathless bacterium so resistant to evolution, and yet so utterly adapted to the lethality of the universe, that, by storing his poem in this organism, he has succeeded at writing a "book" durable enough to persist on Earth until the death of the Sun itself — and even more incredibly, the organism can read this poem and write a text in reply. "The Xenotext" establishes a dialogue between the genetic code and an English poem — and the sheer scale of the strictures upon such a dialogue might make this work one of the most stringently constrained texts ever written in the history of literature. In this lecture, Bök demonstrates how he has beaten the odds against him in order to accomplish this feat.

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia, a globally renowned bestseller, which has won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (in 2002). After 25 years of effort, Bök has, at last, completed The Xenotext — a project that has required him to engineer a deathless bacterium so that its DNA might become a durable archive that can store a poem about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice for eternity, enduring on Earth forever, until the death of the Sun itself. Bök is one of the earliest founders of the literary movement called ‘Conceptualism’ (a poetic school of global renown, responsible for the creation of the website UbuWeb). Bök has exhibited his ‘objets de poesie’ at dozens of galleries around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Bök is a Fellow in both the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Canadian Geographic Society (for his contributions to the Arts). Bök has also received a nomination for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry (in 2023) and for the Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck – Centre Pompidou (in 2025). Bök currently teaches Fine Art in the School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University in Leeds (UK).