Christian Bök
Christian Bök es el autor de Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), una de las obras de literatura experimental más vendidas, ganadora del Premio Griffin de Poesía. Bök es uno de los fundadores de la Literatura Conceptual (la escuela poética de escritura de vanguardia famosa, en parte, por la presentación de su líder, Kenneth Goldsmith, en la Casa Blanca en el 2011). Bök ha creado lenguajes artificiales para dos programas de televisión: Earth: Final Conflict de Gene Roddenberry y Amazon de Peter Benchley. Bök ha ganado muchos elogios por sus virtuosos recitales de poesía sonora (especialmente Die Ursonate por Kurt Schwitters) y ha realizado conferencias y lecturas en más de 200 lugares alrededor de todo el mundo en los últimos cuatro años. Bök está a punto de terminar su proyecto actual, titulado The Xenotext – un trabajo que le obliga a maquinar el genoma de una bacteria imposible de matar para que el ADN de tal organismo pueda llegar a ser no sólo un archivo duradero que almacene un poema para la eternidad, sino también una máquina operativa que escriba un poema en respuesta. Bök hace clases en el Departamento de Inglés de la Universidad de Calgary.
Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001)—a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Poetry Prize. Bök is one of the earliest founders of Conceptual Literature (the poetic school of avant-garde writing made famous, in part, by the performance of its ringleader, Kenneth Goldsmith, at the White House in 2011). Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso recitals of “sound-poems” (particularly Die Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters)—and he has performed lectures and readings at more then 200 venues around the world in the last four years. Bök is on the verge of finishing his current project, entitled The Xenotext—a work that requires him to engineer the genome of an unkillable bacterium so that the DNA of such an organism might become not only a durable archive that stores a poem for eternity, but also an operant machine that writes a poem in response. Bök teaches in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.
Christian Bök’s Poetic Statement
Kenneth Goldsmith (in his essay, introducing a special edition of Poetry on Conceptual Literature) has argued that, for the avant-garde of the new millennium, Flarf constitutes a Dionysian aesthetic, whereas Conceptualism constitutes an Apollonian aesthetic (both of which respond with urgency to the technologies of the digital economy). During the panel, entitled “Flarf and Conceptual Poetry” at the AWP Conference in Denver (2010), I have striven to discuss this contrast between the two avant-garde movements, doing so by using the aesthetic technique of Conceptualism, plagiarizing Goldsmith, reciting his essay, verbatim (because it already says almost everything that I might wish to say)—however, I have chosen to perform this act of plagiarism by using the aesthetic technique of Flarf (inputting, successively, each sentence of the essay into Google with a constraining search-string so as to limit my results, after which I record the highlighted expressions in the order of their appearance, thereafter making grammatical adjustments for the sake of coherence). The results from this exercise consitute a kind of manifesto.
http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/eunoia/
