There is an extreme formalist movement afoot in avant garde poetry. It manifests in books of verse with the most stringent formal constraints of every variety. Anthony Etherin is the leading poet in anagrams and palindromes. In his work, the constraint appears on the surface, knowable to the reader, and adds a layer of enjoyment that resembles a completed puzzle, or a hundred-point play in Scrabble. The constraints employed by Christian Bök are similar in nature, but their deployment in the text is beneath the surface. Bök wishes the reader not to recognize the constraints in the first place, and for them to be revealed later, also producing pleasure akin to a well-executed magic trick. For this reason, Bök’s poetry has often attracted descriptions such as “wizardry,”[i] “occult,” and “magic.” Here is a sample of what I mean, the first four stanzas from Bök’s “Language is a Virus from Outer Space,” which appeared in The Xenotext: Book 1 (Coach House Books, 2015) and was reprinted in my edited volume Pandemic Poems (2020, p.1).
Language
is a virus
from outer space.
Language
is a pursuer
of covert aims.
Language
frames our
virus as poetic.
Language
tapers our
vicious frames.
As I will say below about Bök's epoch-making achievement in English poetry, the verses above are accomplished poetry by any measure, and aesthetically pleasing on first reading. The first stanza is an only somewhat unusual declaration, but the remaining verses are so marked in their diction, with their "covert aims" and "vicious frames," as to surprise readers while they mistakenly believe they are reading a free verse poem. Those phrases that speak darkly from an unknown outsider are a tell in Bök's poetry; when you encounter them, you have met the poetics of the extreme formalist constraint. These stanzas are anagrams. The formalist constraint is not usually evident when you first read Bök, even though you may have been warned in advance about his wizardly tricks.
The Xenotext: Book 2 is his latest major work, intended to be poetry composed with the greatest difficulty, under the most stringent constraints, of any poem ever attempted. Bök, a Canadian poet who has made his career at the University of Calgary, the University of Melbourne, and Charles Darwin University, worked with Prof. Lydia Contreras at The University of Texas at Austin to mark the genetic material of an extremophile bacterium with his sonnet “Orpheus” in such a way that the bacterium responds by creating a protein that encodes another sonnet, “Eurydice.” This is the xenotext–the text from the stranger-organism. The achievement in the poetry lies in its extreme difficulty, and, I am happy to add, its equally extreme beauty.
With the name Xenotext and with the underworld, “infernal,” and “Miltonian” aesthetics[ii] of the poems therein, Bök envisions a newcomer to poetry, a different order of animal, whose nature associates it with the lifelessness of space or the immortality of Satan and of those condemned to hell. The stranger of the Xenotext is adjacent to evil and from a world that spells death for humans. The stranger’s poem is about death, a journey to Hades, and failed resurrection. Sometimes Bök’s descriptions of his achievement limit the organism to the role of repository, library, or bookshelf. But it is alive, and its livingness is one of the key realities of Bök’s work over these years, no matter how much he sometimes thingifies the strangertext. The subjectivity of the bacterium is apparent when Bök conceives of it as “reciting” a poem, as he sometimes does. The xenotext is alive almost unrecognizably and it speaks of death; it is a poet.
It is made to speak by a variety of manipulations. The first we encounter in the volume is statements of fact about the organism's nature, which, by their accumulation and by their alterity, are a poetic achievement in transporting the reader into another world, explicitly identified again and again as an underworld. The stranger is katabatic.
“It resides in micropores of supersense granite, crushed down 3,000 metres below the bedrock of the Earth” (p. 14).
“It devours plutonium” (p. 16).
“It can lie dormant for 40 million years, hibernating inside the gut of a honeybee shrouded in a jewel of amber” (p. 17).
The organism's nature contrasts starkly with conventional aesthetics of poetry, and it is this contrast that I will dwell on here, guided by the concept of “travesty.” Bök’s “wizardry” and extraordinary achievement invites the use of this technical term because of the nature of the organism that has been made a poet. Gérard Genette defines travesty as the retention of the register of the content combined with the debasement of its form.[iii] So, travesty is heroic poetry about heroic subjects presented in a debased, vulgar style. In The Xenotext: Book 2, it is not that the form of the poem has been debased, but of the poet. And the content is elevated, poetic art by any measure. The poet we are asked to contemplate throughout, however, is not even a cockroach. The poet is not as sophisticated as a mollusk. Had a cow been made a poet, like Io in the myth and in the pseudo-Aeschylean Prometheus Bound, perhaps by carving small block letters into its hooves and compelling it to walk through ink, we would have a poet much more closely resembling a poetic subject in conventional aesthetics.
Bök has given us something more akin to a bivalve critiquing the oeuvre of Hieronymus Bosch or a cockroach arguing the case that pornography is art before the United States Supreme Court. He envisions the extremophile bacterium similar to the way David Lynch, in Twin Peaks: The Return, Episode 8, presented the new creation of evil in the wake of WWII—a creeping insectoid being, emerging after a nuclear explosion had exterminated all life, somehow surviving the cataclysm. Bök’s poet is just such a creature, and its survival and deathlessness are key to the poetic achievement of creating an immortal poem/poet in our apocalyptic age. The bloodless katabatic evil of the notion appeals to and is emphasized by Bök in The Xenotext, Book 2.
“It does not die in the hellish infernos at the Städtbibliothek during the firebombing of Dresden” (p. 12).
“It does not die while suffering immolation in the Nazi bonfires at the Opernplatz in Berlin” (p. 13).
Most alarming is not this project’s contribution to an apparatus of demonology, but the debasement of the form of the poet. Conventional poetic aesthetics partakes of a Humanism that engages with that old idea of the Order of Being. The poetic subject is human and offers formulations, commentary, exhortations, and pleas to beings above and to beings below in this Order, and to her fellow humans.
The stranger-poet speaks from the beginning of time. No humans to hear it–only the divine and the most primitive life. Bök wants it to speak from the end of time, also, and he has accomplished that. Coming from the extreme formalist avant garde, the human poet has dared the most extreme debasement of the poetic subject—making a poet of an immortal mote of dust.
The world of Classics is high profile throughout the work. Orpheus and Eurydice, the underworld, Prometheus, Odysseus, and others gather around Bök’s necromantic pit. Poets taking on the figure of Orpheus is a trope, a repeated metapoetic act. It is a self-conscious signal of a poet's affinity for the mythic founder of the art and a claim of position among great poets. Such a claim is involved also in katabatic poetry. There is a connection between the katabatic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and poetic virtuosity in literary adaptations of Greek mythology, going back at least as far as Vergil’s fourth Eclogue and explicit in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 10. Poets might invoke Orpheus alone or in combination with Eurydice and the journey to the underworld to position themselves in the constellation of versifying stars.
Hell, demons, and an overtone of occult witchiness permeate The Xenotext: Book 2 and constitute a pop and Christian layer of the book very well suited to appeal to an audience in 2025. The Classical material is prominent in the background, like many of Bök’s formalist interventions, which often, intentionally, remain an occult mystery to the reader. Beyond the frequent use of ancient Greek names, such as Orpheus, which everyone recognizes, Classical allusions appear mostly to those who know the ancient world well enough to recognize the poetics of the Orphic gold lamellae when they appear in English adaptation. The poem “A Nocturne for Eurydice” is dedicated “For ‘the maiden in her dark, pale meadow,’” which is reminiscent of the “sacred meadows and groves of Persephone”[iv] inscribed on those most strange and wonderful of ancient texts deposited in graves.
“A Shard for the Archangel” (pp. 27-32) recounts a voyage by sea and a hapless crew who nevertheless find their strange quarry, the earliest fossil evidence of life, and of human beings, on an inhospitable shore after a trying voyage on the sea. Odysseus lurks here, behind the references to smoke from fires, behind the illnesses that beset the travellers, behind the final, wounding success of the venture. The archangel of the title needs, I think, the figure of Prometheus to complete it, and he permeates the whole composition as it undertakes an investigation into the origin of life and human civilization.
“My Works, Ye Mighty” (pp. 33-40) appears to be in the voice of a monotheistic god, indicating and checking off the beauties of earth and human art. The latter sometimes destabilizes the characterization, that is, the observations seem to originate from the human rather than from the divine. The title invites us to read the poem alongside Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which contrasts the high ambition of a man with his mortality. Taking the two poems together, Bök is the new Ozymandias who succeeded where his predecessor failed. Bök’s project is immortal, indeed.
All this is a fitting sequel to “A Shard for the Archangel,” which precedes it in the volume, because of the quasi-humanness of Prometheus and Lucifer. “My Works…” ends with a sentence in ancient Greek:
εἰ δέ τις εἰδέναι βούλεται πηλίκος εἰμι καὶ ποῦ κεῖμαι, νικάτω τι τῶν ἐμῶν ἔργων (p. 40).
If anyone wants to know how great I am and where I am buried, outdo something of my works.
This is a quotation from the Library of History by Diodorus Siculus (1.47.4), which reports on an inscription in the persona of the Pharaoh Ramesses II, known in ancient Greek as Ὀσυμανδύας.
Knowing Bök’s unparalleled devotion to hard work and perceiving the affinity the poet feels with claims such as this, the quotation seems to me a challenge to the reader—see if you can do it. It is certainly a challenge to the reviewer, as the poet claims that we will be unable to know how great he is if we don’t prevail in a contest with one of his works. That is an agōn for which I dare not mount a bid.
The debasing travesty of the work engages a via negativa of poetic aesthetics. There is no optimism for the human even as the entire project is a testament to Bök’s human ingenuity. There is optimism for the bacterium and its deathlessness. Readers can expect an experience similar to other fine art that partakes of the via negativa. Reading The Xenotext: Book 2 is a similar experience to listening to Nick Cave’s albums The Lyre of Orpheus, And No More Shall We Part, and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!, or spending the day with the films of David Lynch. It is like looking at thousands of illuminated manuscripts depicting the damnation of hell. It is akin to listening to “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath: “What is this that stands before me?”
It is the stranger-organism that has been to hell and back and unites all human afterlives—it is underground, in space, in the sea, encased in amber, beyond the reach of mortal people, in the most violent cataclysms both natural and martial—it’s in the flood, the fire, the Tunguska event, in every nuclear explosion. Where there is death, there is the xenotext.
[i] A word chosen for Bök’s poetry by Michael Leong in his article “Poetry for the Apocalypse,” American Scientist (https://www.americanscientist.org/article/poetry-for-the-apocalypse).
[ii] Bök used the words “Miltonian” and “infernal” when asked to describe the aesthetics of his work on The Xenotext: Book 2 in a talk at Athabasca University, 30 November 2023.
[iii] Gennette, Gérard, Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree, Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky, University of Nebraska Press, pp. 21-22.
[iv] The formulation in Bremmer, Jan, ”Divinities in the Orphic Gold Leaves: Euklês, Euboleus, Brimo, Kybele, Kore and Persephone,” ZPE 187, p. 47.
