The Globe and Mail re: my interview with Christian Bök
June 15, 2009
I haven’t seen it “on the stand” yet myself, but apparently The Globe and Mail enjoyed my interview with Christian Bök, which is apparently available now. Read what James Adams had to say, in “On the Stand: A Weekly Roundup of the Best Magazine Reads”:
THE BELIEVER
June ’09
Poetry doesn’t sell but Christian Bök’s poetry does. His last (and most recent) book of poems, Eunoia, has been printed at least 19 times in Canada since Anansi launched it in 2001 [in fact, Eunoia was published by Coach House Books, not Anansi -- Jonathan], and today sales in this country alone total more than 20,000 copies. These are the sorts of numbers one usually associates with a strong fiction seller, not a five-part book of experimental verse, seven years in the writing, where each part is devoted to words containing only one of the five vowels.
Bök, a Toronto-born literature prof at the University of Calgary, is currently hard at work on his next poetic endeavour, The Xenotext Project. As described here to interviewer Jonathan Ball, it sounds like something out of a Don DeLillo novel. Simply put (if it, in fact, can be put that way), Bök proposes to write a poem that he would translate, by encipherment, “into a sequence of genetic nucleotides,” then implant in an unkillable, evolution-resistant bacterium. “I guess that this is a kind of ambitious attempt to think about art, quite literally, as an eternal endeavour,” he says. Or at least one lasting the next 6 billion years at which time the sun is expected to explode.
Okay, say, “Huh?” if you wish. But it all makes sense (I think) when you read his explanations. Bök’s one of those uncommonly lucid guys who can speak on complex matters in fully formed paragraphs with sprinkles of piquant metaphor (i.e., “To write a poem nowadays is to knit a doily for a candy dish.”).
— James Adams
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3 Responses to “The Globe and Mail re: my interview with Christian Bök”
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It was a fascinating interview. I’ll be pondering it for some time (Christian’s ideas always have that effect on me). Congrats on getting it into the Believer (& now the Globe)!
too bad they credit “Eunoia”‘s publication to Anansi and not to Coach House Books, eh?
Thanks Peter. And I didn’t even notice that, derek!