The Stentor

Issue date: 2/19/09 Section: Arts and Leisure

Media Credit: www.edmontonpoetryfestival.com Radical Canadian sound poet Christian Bök performs his work with a passion and tenacity that requires the ample pipes he displayed last Wednesday evening in Lilly Reid Holt Memorial Chapel [Click to enlarge]

Christian Bök prefers not to write about himself. At a panel discussion last Thursday in Meyer Auditorium, the experimental sound poet and artist-in-residence said he simply doesn't think his life is interesting enough to be the subject of poetry. "I [want] to be more like a scientist who [is] reverse-engineering some alien technology," he said, describing the roots of his avant-garde style.

Bök was bold in his criticism of today's more conventional poets. "Poetry and other art forms used to develop in relative lockstep to each other," he said, "but in the late 1950's, [poetry] began to detach itself, and stopped learning from the other arts."

In his work, Bök prefers to experiment with language, often focusing on sound rather than meaning in words. For example, in his latest book, Eunoia, many of the poems were written with only one vowel allowed per poem - a restriction that yields fascinating results, but for the most part prevents the poems from expressing much if any decipherable meaning.

On Wednesday night, Bök read from Eunoia during a performance in the Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel. But even the single-vowel poems seemed down-right conventional compared to the sound-poetry he performed next, none of which contained any words at all. Some of this performance resembled the vocal-percussion sounds of "beat-boxing," but included a more expansive array of vocal sound, at one point varying to the point of whining and screeching.

It isn't surprising that Bök's antics were met with mixed reviews by students. To one student, he was "refreshing and innovative." To another, merely "pretentious." But what is interesting - if not surprising - is the pattern behind these reactions; Music students tended to find his performance and ideas creative, whereas English students seemed to react defensively.

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