Christian Bok
He was born "Christian Book", but uses "Bök" as a pseudonym.
A Canadian Poet known for his experimental works. He is the author of Eunioa, which has won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.
He began writing seriously in his early twenties, while earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Carleton University in Ottawa. He returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in English literature at York University, where he encountered a burgeoning literary community that included Steve McCaffery,
Christopher Dewdney, and Darren Wershler. Since 2004, he taught at the University of Calgary — but as of 2022, he works as an artist in Melbourne, Australia, and he serves as a Professor (Honorary Appointee) at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia.
In 1994, Bök published Crystallography, "a pataphysical encyclopaedia that misreads the language of poetics through the conceits of geology" The Village Voice said of it: "Bök's concise reflections on mirrors, fractals, stones, and ice diabolically change the way you think about language — his, yours — so that what begins as description suddenly seems indistinguishable from the thing itself." Crystallography was reissued in 2003 and was nominated for a Gerald Lampert Award.
Bök is a sound poet, who has performed an extremely condensed version of the "Ursonate" by Kurt Schwitters. He has created conceptual art, making artist books from Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks. He has also worked in science-fiction television by constructing artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.
A Canadian Poet known for his experimental works. He is the author of Eunioa, which has won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.
He began writing seriously in his early twenties, while earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Carleton University in Ottawa. He returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in English literature at York University, where he encountered a burgeoning literary community that included Steve McCaffery,
Christopher Dewdney, and Darren Wershler. Since 2004, he taught at the University of Calgary — but as of 2022, he works as an artist in Melbourne, Australia, and he serves as a Professor (Honorary Appointee) at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia.
In 1994, Bök published Crystallography, "a pataphysical encyclopaedia that misreads the language of poetics through the conceits of geology" The Village Voice said of it: "Bök's concise reflections on mirrors, fractals, stones, and ice diabolically change the way you think about language — his, yours — so that what begins as description suddenly seems indistinguishable from the thing itself." Crystallography was reissued in 2003 and was nominated for a Gerald Lampert Award.
Bök is a sound poet, who has performed an extremely condensed version of the "Ursonate" by Kurt Schwitters. He has created conceptual art, making artist books from Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks. He has also worked in science-fiction television by constructing artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.