Lillian H. Smith Blog

There has always been a tension between the idea of poetry as a literary form and an aural one.  It clearly has it's roots in the latter, but is often considered as written work.  According to Jon Stalworthy "What your eye sees on the page is the composer's verbal score, waiting for your voice to bring it alive as you  read it aloud or hear it in your mind's ear.  Unlike our reading of a newspaper, the best reading -that is to say, the most satisfying reading- of a poem involves a simultaneous engagement of eye and ear."

 Nevertheless beyond being appreciated as writing, poems intended for visual appeal in English go back at least as far as George Herbert's Easter Wings (1633).  The twentieth century gave us e.e. cummings, dada, and concrete poetry, but it also gave us sound poetry, scat and beat boxing which dispense not only with images, but with words entirely.

But it often seems that sound and printed word, if not image are as inseperable as yin and yang when it comes to poetry.  John Hollander's Swan and Shadow is one of the most famous shape poems of the twentieth century, yet Hollander himself insists poetry is an experience best heard.

''Poetry may be written on paper, but it's an oral art,'' said Mr. Hollander, who is approaching the start of his second year as Connecticut's poet laureate, an honorary position in which he'll serve until 2011. ''A good poem satisfies the ear. It creates a story or picture that grabs you, informs you and entertains you.'' (New York Times Feb 10 2008).

So it should be no surprise that Canada's Christian Bök author of Eunoia, a book of poems containing only one vowel per poem, and who also believes that poetry is best read aloud has broken new ground in how a poem can be encoded.  Bok has "written" a poem into a single gene (called X-P13) of a strain of E Coli by using a "chemical alphabet". 

Basically a gene consists of a strand of DNA which in turn consists of a string of nucleotides.  Using groupings of nucleotides as cyphers to stand in for letters of the alphabet, a gene can be created that contains a "written" message. The act of encoding textual information into a gene has been done before, but Bök has gone further still. 

Since my postsecondary education is strictly in the humanities realm, I don't really understand this at all.  Nor does Mr Bök entirely but he has gone to a little more trouble than most of us humanities types would. Suffice to say since that DNA controls the sequencing of amino acids in manufacturing proteins Bok's X-P13 gene creates a unique protein that can be decrypted using a second cypher to spell out a second poem.  The only catch is that the second poem is a foregone conclusion.  The DNA won't make just any protein.  Study the host bacteria over many generations and it will produce the same "composition" over and over again.  So much for the traditional muse!

This brings similarities to John Searle's Chinese Room to mind.  Can we really attribute authorship to a bacteria that has been tweaked to produce only one possible message?  Isn't it a bit like calling a music box a composer?  Given that poetry is generally regarded as a form of artistic expression, getting an E coli bacterium to unconsciously parrot someone else's work while an amazing biotechnical feat in itself is hard to imagine as a legitimate expression of the bacterium's own experience or feelings. 

Which begs another ethical question: assuming you can attribute authorship and conscious effort to the E Coli bacterium, if the poem is not to the microbe's taste, isn't it a bit cruel and unusual not merely to subject the poor critter to it, but to force it to declaim it throughout its entire life?  Luckily for Mr. Bök, E-coli bacterium is most often regarded as a loathed parasite and does not elicit the same kind of sympathy as say a cute little seal pup.