[LINK] "A poem becomes immortal embedded in bacterial DNA"

[rfmcdonald]

Experimental Toronto poet Christian Bök's embedded of his newest collection of poetry in the DNA of radiation-resistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans is the subject of this article by the Toronto Star's Ryan Porter. The ambition impresses me, honestly.

At Coach House Books, poet Christian Bök (pronounced “book”) is stuffing signed and lettered copies of his first collection of poetry in 14 years, The Xenotext: Book 1, into zippered wallets.

He’ll build 26 of these Deluxe Edition packages, one for each letter of the alphabet, stuffed with 12 pieces of “ephemera” — including a comic that outlines Bök’s manifesto and a glyph that, when held up to a webcam, creates a hologram of a poem by Amaranth Borsuk.

He’s dressed today in loose jeans, a turquoise T-shirt, a grey blazer and a belt buckle of sufficient size and shine to betray the 10 years he’s spent in Calgary, where he teaches in the English department at the University of Calgary.

The variety of work in The Xenotext includes pastoral poetry, a day-in-the-hive itinerary of a bee colony, a prose explanation of the parts and processes of DNA (including both illustrations and photographs), acrostic poems that use the three-letter structure of a molecule to talk about bees, and ruminations on the apocalypse.

What it does not include are the show-stopping centrepieces of Bök’s ambitious project. It goes something like this: having written the sonnet “Orpheus,” he created a code to translate the English poem into the alphabetical sequences of DNA. He then embedded that translated DNA sequence into E. coli. The E. coli then interpreted that DNA as a set of instructions to build a protein. When the DNA of that protein is translated back into English, it is a new sonnet called “Eurypidis.” (Cue mind explosion.)