On Meeting a Sound Poet

So we went to see Christian Bok at the Tulip Fest, google him if you care. But he was advertised as a sound poet, in that he’s paid to write funny noises down on paper and then say them out loud. I have to admit it was different, it was freaky, at some stages of the show all I could see in the world was his huge lips and teeth as he made the strangest noises, loudly and with definite purpose. At first I assumed he had a deeper worked out meaning to it all.
I bought his book, Eunoia. 5 chapters of verse. Each with only one vowel in it. It took 7 years to write, it’s fun to read, conforming to the rules forces him to put together some unique phrases and ideas, which made it kinda worth while. HOWEVER – his new idea is stupid. Well the way he’s goin about it is kind of stupid. Well maybe just his answer to my stupid question was stupid. But here it is anyway. He’s goin to write a poem and insert it into the DNA of a bacterium, and it would be written so that the protein’s code would also be a poem. (I’m presuming the first poem will use CATG only, and the second would be spelled out with first letters of the amino acids), anyway – yadda yadda inserted in a bacterium so it will survive forever etc etc, and here’s why I don’t think he’s sound, and also why he came across more as a batman baddie by the end of the show: I asked him what the protein would do, that he was writing into the little animal, presuming that he would have some really poignant or clever or beautiful idea about it. Don’t ask me what. I just trusted that he would have thought of something brilliant. Guess what? He hadn’t. The answer was simply – “Ah Science is the easy bit, so eh – doesn’t matter what it does. I think we’ve time for one more question”
Anyway – I realised as we walked home that the reason I was so depressed was the total and utter absence of any true feeling in his work, the cleverness and high falutin-ness of it, without a pick of anything that matters.

The one thing that we enjoyed most about the whole thing was our chat in the queue on the way in (by the way nothing starts on time in Canada – and no one minds, except if the person putting on the show is loitering in the audience drunk for the first three quarters of an hour – but that was a different show).
We met nice language enthusiasts – a translating lecturer woman, and an earnest man with bored teenager & wife in tow. They told us about this Oulypo movement in France. A new one on me. It’s this crowd that used to hang around making up writing rules for each other, and playing games with it. Apparently, one of them wrote a novel without the letter E, in French. And got it successfully translated into English without the letter E either.
Some of the games they used to play are below.
Anyway – we had a fun conversation about trying to spend a year without consuming anything with the letter E in the name of it. You couldn’t have water, but you could have milk, no beer but vodka would be fine, etc etc. See if you can spend the next day without eating anything with the letter E – no tea, coffee, bread, cheese, only a potato, or a tomato – no plurals of those things. Let me know how it works out for ya...