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Jonathan welcomes back poet Christian Bok to talk about his ongoing project, The Xenotext. It’s a poem coded into the genome of a deathless bacterium, thereby creating a text durable enough to outlive any apocalypse.
Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia, a globally renowned bestseller, which has won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (in 2002). After 25 years of effort, Bök has, at last, completed The Xenotext — a project that has required him to engineer a deathless bacterium so that its DNA might become a durable archive that can store a poem about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice for eternity, enduring on Earth forever, until the death of the Sun itself. Bök is one of the earliest founders of the literary movement called ‘Conceptualism’ (a poetic school of global renown, responsible for the creation of the website UbuWeb, now archived at the Library of Congress). Bök has exhibited his ‘objets de poesie’ at dozens of galleries around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Bök is a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada (receiving this honour for his contributions to the Arts). Bök has also received a nomination for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry (in 2023) and for the Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck – Centre Pompidou (in 2025). Bök currently teaches Fine Art in the School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University in Leeds (UK).
Follow Christian Bök on X:
@christianbok
Learn more about Christian Bök at his website:
Learn more about The Xenotext:
The Xenotext (Book 1):
https://chbooks.com/Books/T/The-Xenotext-Book-13
The Xenotext (Book 2):
https://chbooks.com/Books/T/The-Xenotext-Book-2
CREDITS
Opening song is “We Got the Poison” by Electric Candles
Podcast production by Dan Vadeboncoeur
