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 he teaches at the University of Calgary[1].
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Overview
Eunoia is 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 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. Bök is also the author of Crystallography (Coach House Books, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. Bök is a sound poet, having 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, designing artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.
Bibliography
- 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 (2002) ISBN 978-0-8101-1877-5 - See ’Pataphysics
- The Cyborg Opera (forthcoming)
