Christian Bök (born Christian Book, August 10, 1966 in Toronto, Canada) is a Canadian experimental poet. He began writing seriously in his early twenties, while earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Carleton University in Ottawa. He returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in English literature at York University, where he encountered a burgeoning literary community that included Steve McCaffery, Christopher Dewdney, and Darren Wershler-Henry. As of 2005^[update] he teaches at the University of Calgary.^[1]

Contents 1 Career 2 Bibliography 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Career

Eunoia is the work for which he is most famous. Edited by Darren Wershler-Henry at Coach House Books, Eunoia consists of univocalics. Each chapter uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters, and this work has gone on to become a bestseller in Canada, winning the lucrative Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002. "Vowels," a poem that appears in Eunoia, has been featured in the lyrics of a song on the EP A Quick Fix of Melancholy (2003) by the Norwegian band Ulver.

In the book's main part, each chapter used just a single vowel, producing sentences such as this: “Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech.”^[2] Canongate published "Eunoia" in Oct. 2008.^[3] It took 7 years to write Eunoia, and Bök believes "his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language."^[4] In preparation for the novel, Bök read the dictionary a total of five times, compiling an exhaustive list of vocabulary; Bök aimed to use almost all of these words during his work.

Bök is also the author of Crystallography, a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award.

Bök is a sound poet and has performed an extremely condensed version of the "Ursonate" by Kurt Schwitters. He has created conceptual art, making artist's books from Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks. He has also worked in science-fiction television by constructing artistic languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.

In 2006, Christian Bök and his work were the subject of an episode of the television series Heart of a Poet, produced by Canadian filmmaker Maureen Judge.^[5]

[edit] Bibliography

• Destructive Creation: The Politicization of Violence in the Works of Michael Ondaatje (1992)
• Sibyls: Echoes of French Feminism in "The Diviners" and "Lady Oracle" (December 1992) Canadian Literature 135: pg. 80-93.
• Crystallography (1994) ISBN 978-1-55245-119-9
• Eunoia (2001) ISBN 978-1-933368-15-3 - winner of the 2002 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
• Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (2001) ISBN 978-0810118768 - See ’Pataphysics

As editor

• Ground Works: Avante-Garde for Thee (2003) ISBN 978-0887841804

Included in

• Poetry Plastique (2001) ISBN 978-1887123518
• The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology : A Selection of the 2002 Shortlist (2002) ISBN 9780887846762

[edit] See also

• List of Canadian writers
• List of Canadian poets
• Concrete poetry
• Sound poetry

[edit] References

1. ^ The Xenotext Experiment: An Interview with Christian Bök
2. ^ cnjonline.com, God writes his love in one word
3. ^ telegraph.co.uk, There appears to be a something of a mini-boom in books about words
4. ^ news.bbc.co.uk, Beautiful vowels
5. ^ Heart of a Poet: Season 1

[edit] External links

• Christian Bök pages on UbuWeb, including recordings, poetry, and essays
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including audio clip
• University of Calgary Faculty of English profile
• Eunoia online book
• Christian Bök interview and reading on CBC Radio program And Sometimes Y, episode 5, July 25, 2006
• Podcasts recorded at the Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, on May 22, 2008