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Christian Bök
A conceptual introduction:

1. Aesthetic criticism has, of course, remarked at length upon the role of the nude in the history of art, describing the ways in which the body of the woman has become a cipher for both the idealized values of formal "beauty" and the subaltern values of erotic "desire." The pin-ups here suggest the extreme degrees to which a poet might begin to fetishize the sensual, optical appeals of language itself, admiring the contours of letterforms in a manner reminiscent of obsessive, libidinal fixations. The letters in the caption of the usual, porno image have thus begun to displace the nude body, behaving like it rather than referring to it….

2. Such a cartouche is a seedpod of cocoons, ready to burst open, like the front cover of a book, pollenating us with larval spores that we, in turn, incubate and transmit.

3. Innovation in art no longer differs from the kind of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for "improved" products.

4. I do not write anecdotes about my personal life, largely because I do not think that such storytelling is going to make much of an epistemological contribution to our understanding of poetics itself.

5. Langpo has pushed poetry as far as poetry can go; now poetry must find new avenues of thought beyond poetry itself, seeking inspiration, for example, in the work of architects and musicians, scientists and engineers.

6. Lewis Carroll, I believe, has Humpty Dumpty say "take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself."

7. I still feel that I have a very long way to go in order to boost the profile of avant-garde poetry among a mainstream readership.



Bio:

Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Symposium is made possible by grants from the Arizona Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Poets & Writers. We are also grateful for Symposium support from the Arizona Inn; College of Humanities; Book Stop Used Books, and Friends of the Poetry Center, especially Helen S. Schaefer.