The Xenotext: Book 1

by Christian Bök

"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."— The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli , Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium ( Deinococcus radiodurans ), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Genres: Poetry, Science, Nonfiction, Canada

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 2015

About the author

Christian Bök (born Christian Book) 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.

In addtion to his poetry, Bök has created conceptual art, making artist's books from Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks. He has also worked in science-fiction television by designing artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.

As of 2005, he teaches at the University of Calgary.

Reviews

[Jim Elkins]

A Wonderfully Strange Book

The Xenotext is outside genre for at least two reasons, which I can't quite connect: the tone, constraints, and allusions; and the relation of words, diagrams, and images.

Tone, constraints, and allusions

The book’s style and tone
It isn’t possible, I think, to agree with reviewers who say things like “his poems echo the strains of the ancients,” or “already these poems feel eternal, as if they’ve been with us since Virgil, since Homer.”(Marjorie Perloff praises Bök in similar terms.)

The poetry is intentionally cosmic, portentous, and grandiose. Much is written in what Quintilian and Cicero called the “grand” and “ornate” style. But it isn’t at all simply “ancient” or “heroic” in the unironic manner of Virgil or Homer. “Colony Collapse Disorder,” which translates Virgil’s fourth Georgi, is especially clearly the product of an early 21st century writer, especially because of the mixture of the stock of 18th century English poetry (“swales” and “swains” and locutions like “he hath leave to cross”), Swinburnean or Coleridgean excesses (“quenching,” “grieving,” “fountainous battlements,” and “distraught cries” from “damsels”), and contemporary jargon (especially genetics). The opening section, “The Late Heavy Bombardment,” is a bombardment of stentorian, portentous, hyperbolic archaisms. (“What dire seed must these onslaughts have scattered, like shrapnel, across your cremated badlands”–sentences like that read like a comic version of Geoffrey Hill.)

Both sections are voiced with a combination of fin-de-siecle bombast and postmodern hyperornamentation, and if a reader doesn't find some parts aren’t laughable then they might consider how they're reading Virgil and Homer, or for that matter how seriously they're taking the equally cosmic speeches put in the mouths of Marvell characters. (Which is also to say we're not laughing as much as we should at the cosmic speeches of characters like the Silver Surfer.)

The Virgil material in particular is a curious addition to the book. I haven’t read a review that attempts to explain it. Bök suggests Virgil “guided a poet” (Dante!) in the way that he, Bök, guides the reader. He mentions that a line from the second Georgic was the first to be encoded into the DNA of a plant; and he says in several ways that the fourth Georgic is about absolution and redemption for sending things like bees, and more broadly Nature, “to Hell.” But none of those would seem to justify the inclusion of an eccentric translation of the entire of the fourth Georgic. The insistent demands placed on a reader by the bizarre translation resonate in a curious way with the demands produced by the “poetic primer” of genetics. Both will be difficult for most readers, especially those who haven’t read the fourth Georgic or don’t remember their college genetics. The disconnected parallel–a long text by a Roman author, and a long series of “primers” of genetics–reminds me of Derrida’s “clanging,” in Glas, between Hegel and Genet: they just don’t belong together, and yet there they are.

Constraints
All that is saved from being unintentionally humorous by being constrained in many ways. There are at least three kinds of constraints:

(1) Those provided by the conventional labeling in biochemistry: words beginning with “O,” for example, when it is necessary to signify Oxygen; or words ending in A, T, G, or C when it is necessary to signify nucleotides (pp. 100-2).
(2) Those provided by poetics: the virelay, the lipogram, the acrostic, the grimoire, and so forth.
(3) Those added by Bök to echo or elaborate (1) or (2): for example the limitation, in some poems, to words of exactly nine letters (pp. 86-95, 100-2). I think this self-imposed restriction, which he announces on p. 154, is intended to produce a harmony with the three-letter codons (in relation to pp. 100-2) — although of course the steps of the DNA ladder aren’t nine units across.

These molecular, poetic, and aesthetic constraints produce produce a shifting series of warps that cannot easily be assigned to a single voice. The awkwardnesses distort the intended tone, as they do in Adair's English translation of Perec’s La Disparition ( A Void ), which sounds sometimes like a mockery of 18th century prose, and other times like a tin-eared attempt to mimic some regional accent or creole. Those unpredictable effects are saving graces. Otherwise The Xenotext would be overrun by grandiosity. I especially like the weird repetitions he forces himself into in “The Virelay of the Amino Acids,” where he gives himself the task of writing a poem for each of the amino acids, restricting the text to words that begin with the letters of the atoms (Carbon, Nitrogen, etc.). What is weird, and effective, is that there’s no reason why the words couldn’t have been more varied (many words begin with “C” and “N”) but he chooses repetitions at the same time as he imposes repetitions on himself. The result is a language that tries to be both “grand” and “ornate” and is continuously hobbled. It is effective, and here I’m inclined to agree with Marjorie Perloff’s endorsement: “one of the most beautiful poems of our time.”

The dialogic relation of images, diagrams, text

Throughout the Writing with Images project, I’ve been interested in the possibility that visual material might request or require the same amount of attention as text, so images would not function only as illustrations, examples, or ornaments, but would drive, inform, and otherwise direct the reading. Very few writers do this, Sebald and other prominent examples included. The Xenotext comes the closest of any book I’ve seen to accomplishing such an equality of images, diagrams, and writing.

Words and images in relation to the conceptual project
This book is “an introduction” to the “conceptual groundwork” of a real-life project, which is a poem encoded in DNA in a bacterium, and another poem that is produced when that poem is read and translated by the bacterium’s cells into a protein. Presumably those actual poems, or the sum total of genetically modified bacteria, comprise “Book 2.” In this sense the images in The Xenotext are motivated differently from those in the earlier book Crystallography. Both are “aesthetic” projects (the word Bök uses), but The Xenotext is explicitly an introduction to something that exists elsewhere, outside of books and even of human agency. That gives the images in The Xenotext a significance they don’t have in any other work of fiction that I know: they point to real-world correlates in the way that scientific images ordinarily do.

Questions of design
The graphics in The Xenotext are also more crafted, more polished and well-presented, than those in Crystallography. Their professionalism is partly an artifact of the professional chemist’s software that produces them: the ribbon diagrams and charge envelopes on pp. 105-12 are straight from the professional software. (Bök advertises that they were drawn with a supercomputer, but the graphics themselves, without the computing tasks he set, are routinely drawn on personal computers.) In other cases he has chosen fonts, line strengths, and spacing to make diagrams that are both professional-looking and designed. The result is that the QR codes and Conway’s “Life” game cells match well with the diagrams of amino acids (pp. 117, 118), which match well with the star chart that ends the book (p. 147). In Crystallography, some images seemed done on Bök’s own personal computer, others were collaged, and still others were photographed from 18th and 19th century sources (or from the internet). There is no such heterogeneity here. I mention this because the uniformity and care of the images in The Xenotext brings real, professional science into the book in a way that the poetic text does not. There is real genetics and laboratory work behind The Xenotext, but the poems and prose are highly inflected by Bök’s poetics. The images, by default, are what remain to represent genetic science. (There are minor exceptions, such as the chemical formulae in footnotes on pp. 118-37.) So both in terms of the book’s conceptual (and post-human) project as “living poetry,” and also in terms of the book’s design, the illustrations work as signifiers of science.

Implications For Reading
One part of the book in particular creates an unusual sequence of reading, in which an attentive reader, who cares about sense and not only expression, will have to turn back and forth repeatedly from image to text. “The March of the Nucleotides” illustrates how a gene can be written as a poem, and used to produce a protein. Bök begins with a poem, constrained so it makes a spiral pattern, like DNA, and incorporates words that end in the conventional abbreviations for nucleotides (A, C, G, T). A plausible reading order here is:

(1) background (p. 154),
(2) description (p. 98),
(3) diagram of the gene (p. 81),
(4) diagram of the nucleotide molecule (p. 99; this is the least helpful or pertinent),
(5) the poem itself (pp. 100-2),
(6) the codons that produce the amino acids (p. 103),
(7) the computer-generated images of the resulting protein (pp. 105-8), together with
(8) their key (p. 104).

Of these pages, only three are text. Four are colored printouts, two are line drawings, and four are formatted text. It’s the most complete integration of images and text I know, provided a reader is trying actively to follow the transcription process. If not, it probably disintegrates by stages into a reading of the poem and a glance at the other pages.

More on words and images here.

2016, revised 2025

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had difficulty with this book. Though it's full of beautiful poetry and language, it also references a science beyond my understanding.

Simply stated--so I can understand it--Christian Bok (pronounced book) has begun a 2-volume experiment to encode a poem into a bacteria--it worked in E. coli--and which will then generate another bacteria which may survive all other life on earth. Immortality. It begins with a sonnet called "Orpheus," which, when translated into gene form, can be inserted into a cell which will then "read" the poem as instructions for building a protein to encode another sonnet called "Eurydice." All this is wrapped snugly into pages of chemical equations, molecular schematics, and diagrams of Watson and Crick's double helix structure for DNA. I can only assume these pages of chemical drawings representing beehive cells and molecular formation can be read as poetry. All this is preceded by 50 beautiful sonnets closely corresponding to Virgil's Georgics and having to do with beekeeping. It's the pastoral combined with science, and I understand that this works and actually caused E. coli to glow. I don't understand it, though.

I know Bok from an earlier book called Eunoia. It's equally beautiful, a volume which twists word arrangements into a kind of scriptural chant. It won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002, and my pleasurable experience with Eunoia encouraged my reading of The Xenotext even though I'd read it's heavily science-based and intimidatingly difficult. I don't regret reading The Xenotext because the 50 sonnets about bees are extraordinarily breathtaking to read. Exquisite language. My trouble is I can't fathom how they fit into the larger scheme of the poems (the experiment), or even how the poems progress from that point to reach whatever conclusion we find in that final beautiful poem whose context in the whole I couldn't understand.

I do accept pure language. One doesn't necessarily have to understand Finnegans Wake in order to enjoy it. Reading Joyce's verbal acrobatics can be enough until one is able to make sense of it and detect the narrative. I know I'll eventually form an understanding of The Xenotext. I remember many years ago when John Barth published the novel Letters. I'd been reading Barth for years and eagerly awaited it. But the reviews were so congested with references to postmodernisms and epistolary densities and an author presence in bed with his fictional characters that I couldn't even make sense of the reviews. (The reviews of The Xenotext were unintelligible, too.) So I was a few years getting to Letters, but when I did the fog blew away instantly. I expect the same to happen with The Xenotext if I return to it enough times. I love a book I can study, anyway, and this one needs study because I don't understand it.

[Jeff Buddle · Rating 5 out of 5]

An immortal poem. There's no such thing. Even Christian Bök's poem, encoded into the genes of a remarkably hardy bacteria (it can survive in the vacuum of space) will die. When the sun explodes, that is.

Until then the poem, titled "Orpheus" and implanted into the germ's genetic structure, will persist on the planet. All the while the bacteria will respond to Bok's poem with its own poem called "Eurydice."

"The Xenotext" is Bok's poetic chronicle of his scientific/artistic endevor.

The book is steeped in classical poetry. Where Virgil led man into the underworld, Bök escorts us into the deep unknown of ourselves, exploring the nature of life and extinction, diving into the very substance of life only to find its inevitable end.

Bök applies constraints to each poem, cellular constraints, applying the rules of genetics to his poems. These would seem to be impossible rules for a poem, but the more rules he sets down the better Bök's poems. He's oracular here, "orphic" as he describes it. His poems echo the strains of the ancients, but here messages from the gods have become messages from nature.

Remember, this book is just the companion to his real piece. It's the notes that describe a poem we are not able to read. Yet, already these poems feel eternal, as if they've been with us since Virgil, since Homer. More than any other contemporary poet, Bök now seems to be their heir.

[Kamakana · Rating 3 out of 5]

241019: three. this is the basic rating i have decided for any work i read through and sort of enjoy. not necessarily understand but the ambition to try and unify biochemistry and poetry is cool. i actually enjoy less the ‘genre’ poetry of the first section, with typical maybe bathetic allusion to classical heroes, myths, elaborate language etc. i do not know how seriously to take it. i know just enough to not know about dna and biochemistry in general but i liked the clear orders, the little schemes, acrostic, cgi images... this is going somewhere but i cannot follow. my bad. if someone is to explain the science to me perhaps i would really like it. or not. one mathematician tells me math is like any language so of course it can be poetry. another mathematician tells me this is nonsense. so i do not know...

[danielle; ▵ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Done pretending I am going to sit down and analyze this book.

[Paul Guthrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part biology primer, part poetry, part classical literature, readers go from a retelling of a poem by Virgil to explanations of how RNA functions and why proteins fold into specific shapes.

All of this is to set up an understanding of Bök's act of poetic hubric: encoding a poem into the DNA of a bacterium. He plans to write it into an extremophile's genetic code, one that might survive the death of the sun, making his poem the last remnant of human civilization.

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christian Bök is working on a project to encode a poem in the DNA of a particularly durable microorganism. The poem will also create a different poem in a protein molecule as it is read out.
This book is not those poems, nor does it tell the process of trying to actually create such immortal lines. Instead it is a series of his poetic responses to the idea of it. His writing is always impressive by its ability to simultaneously meet excessive formal constraints while conveying sense and beauty. Themes include bees, Orpheus, spirals and helices (in galaxies or climbing vines), immortality, the tree of life, the ability of language to create or bring to life, and DNA. Something about his wide vocabulary being wielded in blank verse was just delicious to read. It felt like reading it was refueling my own creativity.

[Mitchell Clifford · Rating 1 out of 5]

This text works so hard to be high art or academic that it’s inability to be accessible to many it a large fault I find this work of Bok’s. While experimental biology poetry sounds cool, the text itself relies on the reader to have such a large understanding of both poetry and biology that unless you possess both it is truly difficult to grab an understanding of this text.

[melancholinary · Rating 5 out of 5]

For some reason, I can read Bök’s ambition in this book as a sharp critique of longtermism and existential risk discourse. It’s one of the best poetry books I’ve ever read—or, honestly, one of the best science books I’ve ever read. It’s audacious and extraordinarily imaginative.

Even though, in this first volume, Bök is still working with E. coli—and hasn’t yet reached his main aim of encrypting his poetry in the extremophile bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans—as an introduction to his objective for readers, the writing is genuinely compelling, especially in the way it threads together references to Greek mythology and ancient Rome.

What feels particularly striking to me is Bök’s view of human extinction, and perhaps even the end of the universe, because he approaches it through the lens of colony collapse disorder: an extinction that doesn’t arrive as a single cataclysm, but as a slow death. Conceptually, this is what makes Bök’s work so deeply poetic. And as a poet, his writing reaches something very intimate in me—this sense that poetry ought to be encrypted in biology, not in literature.

[Jillian · Rating 2 out of 5]

My rating is more about my personal enjoyment of the book rather than its quality. The idea is cool and the poetry is well written and everything, but it's just really not to my tastes, and I found myself struggling to pick it up and had to force myself to read it a lot.

[Zoë · Rating 4 out of 5]

what

[⏺ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only this is arguably one of the best conceptual projects of all time, but the poetry in the book is incredibly good too. It's also very well explained, in pills, for someone who knows nothing about genetics. Virgil would be proud.
I can't wait to read book 2!

"We were never intended to be tied to whatever made us."

[Update 2025, waiting for my copy of Book 2 to arrive: the poem in the two sections of this book are so complex, they really dare the reader to understand them. There's a very strong pessimistic undercurrent, which is interesting given that the two books are on biogenesis and extinction – but which is which?]

[Patrick Book · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five stars for effort and ingenuity, two stars to myself for not being smart enough to fully grasp something so ambitious.

Despite my inability to totally follow the thread, I remain wholly impressed by Bok’s ideas and execution. I don’t read a lot of poetry so I’m not sure if other poets operate so elegantly when placing such stringent “rules” or guidelines on themselves, but this guy seems to have a singularly remarkable mind.

[Sayuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The basic unit of life is the sign, not the molecule."

[Jake Cooper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Experimental biology poetry. There is great beauty in life, but hymns about nucleotides is a little weird for me.

[Justin (JustinisWesley) Mackie (andnotDavid) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a wired, creative exploration of experimental poetry I am honored to have been exposed too. I hope to pick up more from this author someday. I have never read anything like this, before; like a scientific rubix cube of words weaved with the complexities of the human consciousness, DNA, biological life in relation with the cosmos and in response to that complexity within itself. there are still some thinking I need to do to dichipher more on these thoughtful poems. If they are in fact only that alone? Certainly raises questions, given on the many themes of human existence, extinction and bees. you'll have to read it to attempt to not be too confused as to what I'm trying to explain. hahaha

let's just enjoy it and take it from there. Cheers, Bok! and thank you.

[Anaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a perfect blend of my two loves: Poetry and Biology. The sections on amino acids and central dogma were so creative by explaining the biological processes that I've memorized countless times and also creating poetry from the genetic code and the molecular formula of the amino acids. Slowly realizing how the poems made use of the biological letter encoding the molecules was so cool and I have respect for Bok's creativity in thinking of this.

[Alex Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is both very easy to read and very challenging to understand. Christian Bok's use of words is simply beautiful and exciting. This collection of poems is cryptic and complicated and refer to esoteric things and is not easily decoded. The poems describe the esthetic of genetics, the genesis of life, bees, Greek mythology and the chemistry of DNA.

[Owen Summerscales · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some moments of Bökian brilliance, as you would expect, but overall I felt it lacked the poetic insights of his other science-inspired book, Crystallography (which is amazing). Also the section at the end explaining the poetry was lame. Imagine a book of jokes that had a section explaining the jokes at the end.

[Vivian Zenari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good. I liked the intertwining of classical poetry with contemporary environmental concerns. I did not buy the convergences of all the themes esp the poetry around the DNA and RNA sequences, but I admired the gumption

[Pavel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic exercise of poetic imagination, knowledge (of genetics, Virgil, Keats, Dickenson) and verbal dexterity. Futurist poets would have liked it. One must start this book from the end, with chapter “Vita Explicata” (pp. 150-156), where the idea behind each chapter is explained.

[Deepak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't quite hit as well as the other Bök collections I read. Missing some spark of genius compared to Eunoia or Crystallography. Or maybe I just missed it. But also in the context of the project as a whole, this is meant as a teaser and it does do that well enough.

[Maxxxxo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as interesting as it sounds unfortunately. Often very beautiful but left me unconvinced. Imo if you have to explain each section of your project at the end , maybe it wasn't all that successful. The poetry should speak for itself. It was quite educational though !

[Ramona · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully inventive marvel of a book. Bravo!

[bp · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 for ideation and the DNA-embedded poetry; 3 for captivation and the bee poems, which I was not as much a fan of.

[Kayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very cool book.

[kashi · Rating 3 out of 5]

conceptually extremelyy interesting but the writing j wasn’t hitting

[Juane Pizarro · Rating 4 out of 5]

crazy shit

[Enrico Ribeiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[saroj · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 stars

thinking really hard abt whether RNA is sad that it's initial base sequence is translated and changed so much that it's no longer itself.