The immortal poem by Christian Bök
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.5194Keywords:
Poetry, Conceptual writing, Transgenic art, Living poem, Genetic engineering, Genic editionAbstract
Christian Bök is a Canadian writer and a conceptual poet. He is also a professor in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Along the lines of other conceptual poets who started the field of transgenic art production, Bök engendered a hybrid project between the areas of poetry and biology to create a living and immortal poem. By means of self-taught education in the fields of molecular biology, biogenetics, and genetic engineering, the poet has developed, in theory, a way to write a small poem and insert it into the DNA of a bacteria that is resistant to fire, water, radiation, and also to the explosion of the sun, able to survive also in outer space. In addition, part of his project was to induce the bacteria to read the original poem and to produce a poetic verse in response. This article describes how Christian Bök has proven, in a laboratory. the feasibility of his theory by writing a verse in the DNA of a bacteria that is a model for genetic studies, Escherichia coli, and obtaining from it, soon after, a verse in response.
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