Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha...

Christian Bök is probably Canada's most famous living experimental poet, consciously following in the tradition of Kurt Schwitters (whose poem Ursonate Bök claims to be able to recite faster than anyone in the world) and Georges Perec (whose novel La Disparition does not use the letter E; upon reading it, Bök reportedly said, "Pfft, I can do this.").

Enfettered, these few sentences repress free speech. The text deletes selected letters...

Bök made his name with a book of poetry which made Perec's E-less project look like child's play. The book is called Eunoia, and its most famous chapter is made up of five lengthy poems that use only one vowel of the alphabet apiece. As if that is not ambitious enough, Bök set for himself a number of "subsidiary rules" as well:

All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage... The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire...The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.

A, E, I, O, and U make up "Eunoia" proper. A second chapter called "Oiseau" follows -- named, of course, after the shortest French word that includes all five vowels. "Oiseau" includes And Sometimes (made up of words whose only "vowel" is Y), Vowels (made up of words that use the letters in the word "vowels"), W (a paean to one of Bök's favourite letters, which inhabits the ambiguous space between a vowel and a consonant), and Emended Excess (a poem made up of extra E-only words, dedicated, tongue-in-cheekily, to Georges Perec).

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script...

The word "eunoia" means "beautiful thinking" and it is the shortest word in the English language to include all five vowels. The book is, as one might imagine, strange and artificial and pretentious. But it is also lyrical and beautiful. By that I do not mean "as beautiful as you can expect a gimmick to be" or "beautiful under the circumstances" -- I mean it is actually beautiful, breathtakingly so. It is even more stunning to hear Bök perform it; Eunoia takes about half an hour to read aloud.

Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books. Books form cocoons of comfort...

You might have encountered Bök's work in surprising places. He has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon. He is dedicated to breaking down the boundaries between media, meaning that he is a visual artist and a musician as well as a poet -- perhaps he would say that being a poet means being a visual artist and a musician -- and he clearly loves the opportunities that the World Wide Web provides. He likes to blur boundaries between genres as well: his book Crystallography explores the relationship between science and poetry ("crystallography" is the study of crystals, but the word literally means "lucid writing").

Kultur spurns Ubu -- thus Ubu pulls stunts...

Bök earned his B.A. and his M.A. at Carleton University in Ottawa, and his Ph.D. at York University in Toronto. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Calgary, and is affiliated with the Coach House Press, one of Canada's most lively and vibrant independent presses.

Experience it yourself:

The entire text of Eunoia is available online.
You can hear Bök perform Eunoia here.
Other excerpts of Bök's sound poetry can be found here and there. His current work in progress, the Cyborg Opera, can be sampled here.