Dickenson focuses on poetry that draws on avant-garde and experimental precursors such as Alfred Jarry and John Cage. Particularly striking is the section called “Transgenic Poetics”, looking at figures who manipulate proteins and DNA as part of their practice, such as the artist Eduardo Kac, who once famously created a luminous albino rabbit by splicing a jellyfish protein into its genetic material; or the poet Christian Bök, who worked with scientists to translate a poem into a genetic sequence that was then inserted into a bacterium’s genome. Bök’s poem, “as a set of genetic instructions, causes the organism to produce a protein which, according to the chemical code used in the experiment constitutes another legible poem”.
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1601431.ece
|