University acquires new and rare Bök

By Gail Anne Corbett

A controversial poet who describes himself as a literary mad scientist is bringing his experimental style to campus.

Christian Bök (née Book), one of the country’s most coveted and controversial sound poets, recently took on teaching duties as an assistant professor in the Department of English.

Bök is the the fastest-selling poet in Canadian history.

“I like to think of poetry as a kind of secret, mental R&D in which the poet strives to become a mad scientist who designs new molecules of nerve gas in his own basement laboratory,” says Bök.

“ I am hoping that my tenure at the University of Calgary might afford me access to all the conceptual resources needed to fulfill my dreams of building even bigger, even better, literary versions of supercolliders.”

Eunoia (2001), his most recent book, sold more than 15,000 copies in less than 12 months, and in 2002 it earned him the prestigious Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence, worth $40,000. His book is the first work of poetry to appear for five weeks on The Globe and Mail’s bestseller list, and the edition has already gone through 14 reprints. In a literary market where sales of 600 earn the title of bestseller, Eunoia’s sales are unprecedented. His debut collection, Crystallography (1994 and 2003) fetches more than $200 (US) among rare book collectors.

“It is no exaggeration to say that Christian Bök has the highest international profile of any poet in Canada,” says Susan Rudy, head of U of C’s Department of English. “He is young, risk-taking, experimental, but he is also a highly-respected scholar.”
Bök will teach a senior creative seminar on writing and a junior academic lecture on poetics.

The poet has captured the attention of the Canadian literary industry for his avant-garde writing.

He finds inspiration in many unorthodox, aesthetic movements, including, among others, the French Oulipo, which eschews romantic notions of poetic inspiration in favour of more mannered notions of formal restriction and experimentation. Eunoia — the title of which means beautiful thinking and which is the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels — takes such innovative principles of constraint to daunting extremes. Each of the five sections in the book is univocalic, employing only one of the five vowels throughout the entire chapter.

The book is hailed for its linguistic virtuosity and its marvelous musicality. His book, Pataphy-sics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science, has just been published by Northwestern University Press.

Bök, who was born in 1966 in Etobicoke and grew up in the village of Limehouse, is working on a new book of poetry called The Cyborg Opera, a literary response to the milieu of techno music.