School hosts Bök; bookworms got lots of joy

Mainstream, typical, and predictable: adjectives that do not even begin to describe Christian Bök. Instead, imagine a poet who would spend hours down in his basement designing a new brand of nerve gas to be sprung on the population. However, instead of chemicals, he uses the viral thing called language.

Poet, Christian Bok, reads his ‘sound poetry’. Photo by David Bakker

On January 28th, Redeemer University College hosted Christian Bök, his presence, and his voice. He is most well known for his work Eunoia, which has drawn extensive praise and won the Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada’s most generous poetry prize). The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means beautiful thinking, is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. The book is a literary experiment with extreme formalistic restraints as each chapter contains only one vowel – the first chapter A, the second chapter E, etc. Along with this, each vowel takes on a distict personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic. Bök describes this experiment as the “willful crippling of language in order to show that, even under such impossible conditions of duress, language still can express an uncanny, if not sublime plot.” In preparation for the novel, Bok read the dictionary a total of five times and categorized the words by vowel and by parts of speech. Can you imagine him doing this in his basement?

Bök prides himself in his element of innovation. He states that in order to produce knowledge, quite literally, it must be something that is a surprise, something that you did not know before. And surprised you would have been if you walked in halfway through his poetry reading. From the hallway you might have thought you were hearing a seahorse or a flying fish. However, as you entered into the full Boardroom you would have met Bök contorting his face in incredible ways in order to create sounds you might have thought humans incapable of.

Sound poetry is a movement that roots itself in the tradition (Bök would cringe at my use of this word) that attempts to break language from the logic of syntax and structure to create a purely emotional response. A room full of people from all types of interests and ages sat enthralled and entertained by his performance for the entire 30 minutes. He satisfied those who “just don’t get poetry” and unsettled those who “just do” by comparing poetry to listening to music, which then caused us to wonder about the value of being able to understand and discover meaning.

We gave him the opportunity to share and he left us with a lasting impression of possibility. As he closed the reading he informed us of his upcoming Xenotext experiment in which he will create an example of living poetry by encoding a short verse into a sequence of DNA in order to implant it into a bacterium. Bök considers the new to be a fundamental value because it is impossible to produce knowledge unless you are invested in the new. If this is the case let’s hope that he never runs out of ideas.