Interview with Christian Bok

One of my favorite contemporary experimental poets is Christian Bök (pronounced “Book”), and the recent interview with him in Postmodern Culture about his “Xenotext Experiment” is pretty fascinating.

Eunoia is the book that got Bok the most attention. Probably best to let Coach House describe this:

The word ‘eunoia’, which literally means ‘beautiful thinking’, is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram (the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter only E, etc.). Each vowel takes on a distinct personality – the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegaic and epic (Bök actually retells the entire Iliad in Chapter E; you have to read it to believe it).

The process for writing this sounds intense:

CB: Writing Eunoia proved to be an arduous task. I read through all three volumes of the Webster’s Third International Unabridged Dictionary, doing so five times in order to extract an extensive lexicon of univocal words, each containing only one of the five vowels. I could have automated this process, but I figured that learning the software to write a program would probably take just as long as the manual labor itself—so I simply got started on the project. I arranged the words into parts of speech (noun, verb, etc.); then I arranged these lists into topical categories (creatures, foodstuff, etc.), so that I could determine what stories the vowels could tell. I then spent six years, working four or five hours every night after work, from about midnight on, piecing together a five-chapter novel, doing so until I exhausted this restricted vocabulary. I thought that the text would be minimally comprehensible, but grammatically correct, and I was surprised to discover many uncanny coincidences that induced intimations of paranoia. I began to feel that language played host to a conspiracy, almost as if these words were destined to be arranged in this manner, lending themselves to no other task, but this one, each vowel revealing an individual personality.

I actually met Christian Bök at a “noulipo” Conference (which, for the most part, totally sucked) and heard him read from The Cyborg Opera, which

is supposed to be a kind of “spoken techno” that emulates the robotic pulses heard everywhere in our daily lives. The excerpt entitled “Mushroom Clouds” takes some of its inspiration from the acoustic ambience of Super Mario Bros. by Nintendo.”

And yes, it totally sounded like Super Mario Bros. And caused severe flashbacks. . . .

(UPenn has mp3s of a number of Bok poems, including some “synt loops” from The Cyborg Opera for anyone who’s interested.)

Anyway, I hope more of his work trickles down out of Canada. He got some decent attention for Euonia, but I got the sense this could’ve been better distributed throughout the States.