Christian Bök in Sydney

                                                 (foto - Sharon Harris)

Christian Bök (born Book in Toronto 1966) is a Canadian experimental poet. He is a sound poet best known for holding the world record of the fastest rendition of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. He performed this double-speed live on WFMU Radio, New York, where he also performed other compositions derived from made-up languages used for Canadian science fiction shows.

Eunoia is probably the work for which he is most famous. Edited by Darren Wershler-Henry at Coach House Books, Eunoia is a lipogram that uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters, and this work was a bestseller in Canada and won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002. One of its sections is chapter e for René Crevel.
'Vowels', a poem that appears in Eunoia was featured in the lyrics of a song on the EP 'A Quick Fix of Melancholy' by the Norwegian rock band 'Ulver' in 2003. Bök is also the author of Crystallography (Coach House Books, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia. He has created conceptual art, making artist's books from Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks. Bök is a Ph.D. graduate from York University in Toronto. He teaches at the University of Calgary. He has also worked in sci-fi television, designing artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon. He lives in Calgary.

Christian Bök's publications:
Crystallography (1994) ISBN 1552451194
Eunoia (2001) ISBN 1933368152
Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (2002)
ISBN 0810118777
The Cyborg Opera (forthcoming)

Christian Bök will be presenting his work
at UTS this Tuesday afternoon

Tuesday October 3 5pm
UTS Building 6 (Design and Architecture Building),
Level 3, Room 21
Enter from Harris Street steps
beneath the pedestrian bridge.
Free entry, all welcome.

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