Dear all
(with apologies for cross-posting)
Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre
Down from the Text
all welcome!
Tuesday May 3
Giles Goodland & Ron Silliman
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2011/04/giles-goodland-ron-silliman- tuesday-may.html
7pm at 32 Tavistock Square, London WC1
Wednesday May 4, a POLYply/ CPRC co-presentation
POLYply Voicings
Christian Bök
Lydia White
Dan Scott
Frances Kruk
Emmanuelle Waekerle
7pm at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton St., London WC1
Thursday May 5, Birkbeck Centre for Poetics welcomes Christian Bök
'The Xenotext: A Progress Report'
The Xenotext is my nine-year long attempt to create an example of 'living poetry'. I have been
striving to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I use a 'chemical alphabet'
to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a
bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans - an extremophile, capable of
surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer
space). When translated into a gene and then integrated into the cell, my poem is going to
constitute a set of instructions, all of which cause the organism to manufacture a viable, benign
protein in response - a protein that, according to my original, chemical alphabet, is itself yet
another text. I am, in effect, engineering a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive
for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem - one that can persist
on the planet until the sun itself explodes...
come and hear how the Xenotext project is working..
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-xenotext-works/
6-6.50pm, a public talk, all welcome
Birkbeck venue tbc
best to all
Carol
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