Susan Vanderborg (bio)
University of South Carolina
Abstract
Transgenic poetry, in which a verbal text is coded as DNA and placed within a life form, has both extended and called into question some of the most basic generic conventions of poetry. This essay uses theories of parasitic language to examine transgenic poetry’s emphasis on noise and loss, focusing on two prominent texts engaged with human reshaping of the environment: Eduardo Kac’s Genesis and Christian Bök’s ongoing The Xenotext Experiment.
The next step in the evolution of poetry might involve living media. In 2003, Eduardo Kac described an innovative format, that of “[t]ransgenic poetry,” where the poet must “synthesize DNA according to invented codes to write words and sentences using combinations of nucleotides” and then “[i]ncorporate these DNA words and sentences into the genome of living organisms” (“Biopoetry”). Joe Davis, an early transgenic poet, coded the words, “‘I am the riddle of life know me and you will know yourself’”—a phrase used in a mid-twentieth-century conversation between biologists—into DNA and implanted this updated “Delphi[c]” DNA text into E. coli in 1994 (259-60).1
While transgenic poetry’s living vessels have been the subject of reviews and some extended scholarship, there is significant debate about how to read them as poems: how to examine the ways in which their authors rework the genre and how to assess the environmental arguments these authors make using such poetic formats. Mapping a transgenic poetics becomes all the more difficult because, as Judith Roof argues in The Poetics of DNA, the idea of “read[ing]” DNA as “alphabet,” “book,” or “code”—i.e., as something “transparent,” “accessible,” “translatable,” and “editable” (7, 15-6)—does a disservice to the “complexity” of both genetics and literature (215).2 She concludes, “If, in fact, we actually learned to read—actually understood that language is multivalent, that nothing exists in a stable, secure relation—our abilities to understand and deploy substances such as DNA would in the end be much greater” (215). Roof’s book does not discuss poetry, but the practice of destabilizing reading and metaphors for reading is a hallmark of the most ambitious transgenic poems. The latter are not simply interdisciplinary poems whose signifiers need deciphering, but poems that foreground noise and opacity across multiple signifying systems with fluid sources and repeated interruptions. Such poems’ most excessive displays are sometimes shadowed by forms of loss—the loss not only of familiar genre conventions but of settled content, reliable textual translations, and at times recognizable language itself—as these poems attempt to remap poetry’s structures, responsibilities, and limits within the genetic experiments of the Anthropocene. In this essay, I explore two prominent texts that set out different agendas and formats for the transgenic poem: Eduardo Kac’s Genesis and Christian Bök’s ongoing The Xenotext Experiment.
The Noise of Genesis
Kac first displayed his viewer-responsive transgenic poem, Genesis, at the 1999 Ars Electronica festival in Austria. In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, he explains:
The key element of the work is an “artist’s gene,” i.e. a synthetic gene that I invented and that does not exist in nature. This gene was created by translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse Code, and converting the Morse Code into DNA base pairs according to a conversion principle which I developed specifically for this work. The sentence reads: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” This sentence was chosen for its implications regarding the dubious notion of humanity’s (divinely sanctioned) supremacy over nature. (“Genesis” 310)
Kac also used E. coli as the host for his artist’s gene. The bacterium is prone to mutations, and those viewing the Genesis exhibit in person or on the Internet could engage UV radiation to increase these mutations, rewriting the premises of the biblical sentence (Telepresence 252). As critics have noted, Kac’s project both questions and colludes with human manipulations of nature, self-consciously using its own bioengineering to comment on the uses and perceptions of that science.3 Kac sent the gene model to a laboratory to be manufactured, and his project required substantial exhibition equipment (Telepresence 251). At the first exhibition of the work, a “microvideo camera, a UV light box, and a microscope illuminator” linked “to a video projector and two networked computers” produced stunning visuals from the Petri culture (251). Bacteria with the Genesis gene turned blue under the UV light, bacteria lacking the gene gleamed yellow, and a green hue signified the intermixing of the two types (“Genesis” 310).4 Kac’s website lists forty-one exhibitions of Genesis in different countries through 2015, an exhibition cycle that has incorporated new mutations and text displays, including “Indian black granite tablets” featuring the phrase from the biblical Genesis, its Morse format, and the bases of the artist’s gene (Telepresence 255); gold and glass sculptures about the Genesis gene and protein (257); video art (260); and “giclée print[s]” of the Petri culture bacteria and letter changes (259).
Why would Kac specifically describe his transgenic art as poetry, and where exactly is the poem? As Kac states in his introduction to the first edition of Media Poetry, he is less focused on composing traditional poetic forms such as “lyric sonnets” via new technology than on discovering entirely different “reading possibilities” suggested by technopoetry (12). He defines poetry broadly as “a profound engagement with language” that also “liberates language from ordinary constraints” (introduction to Media Poetry [2007] 10). His oft-cited definition of the subgenre of “biopoetry,” of which the transgenic poem is one example, takes poetry past the constraints of human language: “the use of biotechnology and living organisms in poetry as a new realm of verbal, paraverbal and nonverbal creation,” whose “possibilities” include “infrasound” poems directed at elephants and poems created by firefly light flashes (“Biopoetry”), neither of which could be paraphrased easily using human signifiers.
Genesis simultaneously uses, challenges, and supersedes the human word.5 Here, “liberat[ion]” can seem more like diminution; the linguistic segment of Genesis most recognizable to human poetry readers is limited to a single coded sentence and its revisions, which appear in the Petri projection simply as color clusters. However, as the project moves into an analysis of metaphors of language and communication, this sentence might only be part of the poem’s linguistic investigation. Kac’s essays on Genesis and other biopoems, which he sees as extensions of the poems’ language, use the tropes of “dialogue[]” and “communication” to explore “interspecies interaction, ‘biotelematics,’ and ‘biorobotics,’” as well as code “conversion principle[s]” (Telepresence 218, 249).6 These metaphors might seem “reductive” (255) for precisely the reasons Roof outlines. N. Katherine Hayles, for instance, rebukes Kac for using the word “‘translation’” to describe the transition from Morse-rendered letters to DNA in Genesis, because this word falsely implies an “equivalence between language understood by humans and the biological specificity of protein folding” (“Who Is in Control Here?” 84).
For his part, Kac fully appreciates the usage problem. He calls into question “[t]erms like ‘transcription,’ as well as ‘code,’ ‘translation,’ and many others commonly employed in molecular biology,” because they “betray an ideological stance, a conflation of linguistic metaphors and biological entities, whose rhetorical goal is to instrumentalize processes of life” (“Life Transformation” 183).7 Throughout his descriptions of biopoetry, Kac uses words such as “writable” or “dialogues” as studied provocations (“Genesis” 310-11), reminding readers of the messy “construct[ion]” of each “metaphor” (Telepresence 262), and often challenging the idea of reliable data transmission, i.e., “the very possibility of communication” itself (218). Instead of presenting smooth, clear transitions from one code, medium, or discipline to the next, Genesis foregrounds encodings and “intersemiotic” “translations” (256) that are avowedly incomplete, imprecise, or distorted, from the obvious Petri dish letter changes in the bacterial biblical text to Kac’s speculations that “Morse code,” rather than being a neutral medium for relaying words, might have been formulated as a vehicle for “the bigotry of nativist ideology” that its creator endorsed (261).
There are subtler breaks, too, in data presentation throughout the project. Kac’s essay in the 1999 exhibition catalogue, for instance, tantalizes readers with another inter-field translation, this time converting genetic material into melody: “DNA music, generated live in the gallery, is synthesized by the use of a complex algorithm that transcribes the physiology of DNA into musical parameters” (“Genesis” 311). Kac’s text does not specify the algorithm or parameters, or explain their complexity (though Kac’s website now offers a link to the composition details). The sheer play of colors and texts at the exhibition—English words, Morse code, DNA base abbreviations on the gallery walls—alongside the supporting machines and music must have felt overwhelming rather than simply informative (Telepresence 251), even before the later addition of the gene and protein art. Sensory overload is part of the point. The noisy poetic site of Genesis, Kac states, expresses “the paradoxical condition of the nonexpert in the age of biotechnology” (Telepresence 252). Surrounded by new genetic specimens, we may not fully understand their manufacture, but we must still interact with them and confront the advertising images and economic rumors broadcast about them.8 “[E]ven inaction,” Kac emphasizes, “implicate[s]” the observer (“Fifty Questions” 40): “To click or not to click” on the textual error-generating UV radiation in Genesis is always “an ethical decision” (Telepresence 252), a map in miniature for thinking about the equally noisy, “unpredictab[le]” results (260) of our environmental decisions.
There are precedents in avant-garde writing for a poetics that foregrounds data loss, noise, breaks, and distractions. Kac’s celebration of “interfere[nce]” and “noise” (“Fifty Questions” 40) at each stage of Genesis aligns his transgenic art with what scholars such as Craig Dworkin have, adapting Michel Serres’s communication theory in The Parasite, described as a poetics of “‘noise’” (46). Serres’s observation that all information delivery involves the “parasit[ic]” interposition of “noise” within the medium—”we know of no system that functions perfectly, that is to say, without losses, flights, wear and tear, errors, accidents, opacity”—segues into his famous argument that the “noise” we try to “suppress[]” is what enables “communication” (12-13).9 Serres’s own reconstruction of Genesis and John proclaims, “In the beginning was the noise” (13). Approaching noise through literature, Serres locates the themes of “nonsense, pure noise, [and] disorder” in canonical texts (185), reading poetry for “truth statements,” as Marjorie Perloff notes (“‘Multiple Pleats’” 190). Yet Serres’s The Parasite also asks us to imagine new stylistic “system[s]” and texts openly structured around noisy “[m]istakes,” “confusion,” “interrupt[ions],” and “shocks,” instead of “equilibrium” (12-13). His noise model has been used to analyze the semantic and visual distortions of Language poems,10 such as the deliberate “miscommunication[s]” or “malapropisms” in Charles Bernstein’s texts, which reflect the confusion of a contemporary subject trapped “in an increasingly alien technospace” (Perloff, “‘Multiple Pleats’” 194)—a feeling that might resonate with Genesis‘s viewers. Dworkin argues that a poetics of noise might also generate a “[p]olitics of [n]oise,” as he scrutinizes sound and typographic play in Susan Howe’s poems, which elide the “distinction between ‘message’ and ‘noise’” to challenge “received perspectives and centers of power” (31, 48, 38). The “opacity” in noise-based Language poetry, Ming-Qian Ma concurs, can offer a “radical critique of society and culture,” as these forces are shaped by “‘systemic’” devices “of sense-making” in normative “‘communication’” (183, 175).
These three poetic studies do not mention transgenic poetry, but Kac’s Genesis creates an even broader range of noisy interferences across various formats in its own critique of the human tropes of “dominion” and transmission.11 Genesis not only redefines the poetry book as a showcase for noise to which readers actively contribute, but its unusual bioform can be said to embody Serres’s idea of parasitically noisy language—with the twist that here the human poetic text is interposed in a microbial host. Serres might appreciate the ambiguity, in Genesis, over what the parasite actually is. The Parasite, while it associates “noises” with “[s]ickness, epidemics,” and the “metamorphoses” of “bacteria” (253), also adapts its metaphor to discuss “animals whom we parasite” (78), and to describe humans and their products as parasites on the ecosphere: “Tomorrow,” writes Serres, “we will remember, with some difficulty, our moving and sonorous world, polluted with the unbreathable, stinking air of motors” and their “noise” (141). Serres ties these images to speculations about the birth of “[p]rivate property” in the story of the person who gets to take the item he contaminates (140), a parallel to Genesis‘s focus on claims of owning the planet and its creatures.
Looking more closely at the textual play of noise helps to explain both the structure of Kac’s poetry and its possible ability to foreground or contest a particular “ideological stance” (“Life Transformation” 183). The final text is never set here; every exhibition of Genesis is at once the primary poem and tangential noise, producing new letter mutations in its iteration of the process. Reviewers generally acknowledge the subversion of the bible premise the mutations can produce, but there are few readings that engage the specific details of the work as noise makes the language less recognizable. By the time the Ars Electronica 99 exhibition had closed, Kac had recorded several letter changes—”LET AAN HAVE DOMINION OVER THE FISH OF THE SEA AND OVER THE FOWL OF THE AIR AND OVER EVERY LIVING THING THAT IOVES UA EON THE EARTH” (Telepresence 254). The changes, more pronounced at the sentence’s end as if symbolically picking up speed, can be seen as systemic stammers or stoppages, part of the process of seeing how long it takes for each letter group to lose its recognizable denotation in English or any other Latin alphabet-based language, with former “typos” transformed “into gibberish,” in Steve Tomasula’s words (“Gene(sis)” 255), so that any search for guidance from this biblical excerpt should conclusively be halted.
Alternatively, I would argue that these shifts can be read back into flexible new satirical patterns in which they defamiliarize “man” as lord, suggest errors over the span of an “EON,” and transform the detectable movements of creatures into something less decipherable that might evoke a distorted view of “U”/you the manipulator as well. Kac’s The Book of Mutations (2001)—whose prints, which can be viewed on his website, include artistic representations of different sets of sentence letter shifts from Genesis bacteria—proffers other ways to remake and repopulate the original line’s world. It is tempting to see in the third page’s “DEMINION,” for instance, a bid to remove the hierarchy of “minion[s]” and lords that “dominion” suggests—or does its sound play instead accuse us of being infernal “demons” for our misuses of nature? Here we watch the isolated “man” transform into the symbiotically inclusive conjunction “AND,” while “moves” becomes “DOVES” and the “sea” changes to the act of perception marked by “SEE,” as if readers were asked for their own interpretations of the revisions. Imagine an ecopoetry book, Kac’s Mutations suggests, that is not a set artifact of bound pages making arguments about the ramifications of biotech, but rather an ongoing parasitic reinvention of one problematic introductory statement. In Kac’s book, we see multiple ways in which that beginning could be destabilized, while also being reminded of our own insistent desire to order the environment—not only to start an experiment, as in choosing to engage the UV radiation, but to impose human meanings on random outcomes by ordering chaotic letter sequences back into semantic units, or by turning biological events into metaphors for the nature narratives we would like to exist.
To thwart such ways of reading, Genesis‘s poem occasionally refuses to allow the recuperation of its noise back into letters at all. “The code is not translated back after each and every show,” Kac states (“Trans-Genesis”), which means that in some shows the new textual revisions remain wholly unreadable. Do they still comprise part of the poem, then? Whether it is read or not, the noise has no clear endpoint, unlike the elements in a print text.12 “Genesis does not have a specific duration,” Kac points out; “[s]ome galleries host the show for a few months, others for a few weeks” (“Trans-Genesis”). But these are artificial limits, for any one experiment could run “‘indefinitely’” (“Genesis: A Transgenic Artwork” 19). There is quiet commentary in having a living unbounded poem, a reminder that the effects of bioengineering in the outside world do not often have temporal limits, to say nothing of the careful containment protocols of an exhibition.
The poem’s language, moreover, does not simply become unrecognizable in its noisy bacterial revisions, but rather reveals a source that was already plagued by noise and loss from its inception. Kac identifies his quoted sentence as taken from the King James Bible, explaining at length the background that made this edition a good target to satirize (Telepresence 261), but a source check will find the noise in his attribution. “‘Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’” (“Genesis” 310) is not an exact quotation. Kac’s sentence seems to merge similar statements from two verses, 26 and 28, in the King James’s first chapter of Genesis:
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (New American Library 9)
While Kac’s Telepresence chapter on Genesis doesn’t mention his adaptations, it suggests one possible cause: his source was not a print bible, but an unspecified webpage (251), evoking an archive that, like the reinventable book pages, might be more transient or prone to intrusive revisions. Kac or the online citer modernizes the verb into “moves,” as if the source had mutated to accommodate contemporary readers. The fact that verses 26 and 28 have nearly the same phrasing draws attention to the repetition and noisy excess already present in the King James text itself, with the differences subtly subverting the credibility of either verse, making us wonder which one presents the true extent of the granted “dominion.” Nor are these the only problems with the source. The Telepresence chapter delights in mentioning “deliberate and accidental changes” in early print bibles and in pointing out that the King James text—a translation in a strictly linguistic sense—was also deeply collaged and “ideological”:
I selected the King James English version (KJV), instead of the Hebrew original text, as a means of highlighting the multiple mutations of the Old Testament and its interpretations and also to illustrate the ideological implications of an alleged “authoritative” translation. King James tried to establish a final text by commissioning several scholars (a total of forty-seven worked on the project) to produce this translation, meant to be univocal. Instead, this collaborative effort represents the result of several “voices” at work simultaneously.(261)13
Kac emphasizes the noise in the King James translation’s flawed human artistry. The king’s most strenuous attempts to ensure a seamless, “‘authoritative’” bible only demonstrated the fictionality of “a final text” that subordinated nonhuman animals as well as rationalized, in Kac’s view, a “fierce British colonialism” on religious grounds (Telepresence 261). There is noisy retranslation and alteration, too, in the very style of Kac’s essays. Part of the Genesis piece that appeared in Ars Electronica is reproduced in the Telepresence chapter on Genesis, which also has several segments that overlap with the essays “Transgenic Art Online” and “Life Transformation—Art Mutation.” Sometimes whole paragraphs are repeated but for small changes that challenge the reader to track them, or else, as in the case of the King James commentary, text is moved from note to main body, further blurring the idea of a central message with parasitical noise. Each essay’s revisions, losses, and reframings make us reevaluate Genesis‘s significance.
Consider, finally, the contributions of the poem’s vessel. It is a truism that postmodern poetry foregrounds the materiality of its signifiers, and Kac’s later recasting of Genesis‘s sentence, gene, or protein using materials such as granite, gold, and glass, each with its own distinctive appearance and symbolic connotations, simply entices us to reexamine the initial host: the bacterium itself. What additional noise is introduced by the choice of a particular host for a transgenic poem, a host with its own unique biology and history (in E. coli‘s case, the bacterium’s use in genetics experiments), an organism surrounded by cultural myths that we create? Serres’s The Parasite lovingly details the literary mythology surrounding each organic parasite or scavenger he discusses. In bio texts, as David Crandall notes, when one proposes the idea of a transgenic newspaper “archive” located in “the junk DNA of New York cockroaches,” the suggestion provokes humor (114)—or disgust—that distracts us in our reading, even if the source words are coded without error. Such distractions make us more aware of our species biases. Kac’s choice of E. coli is itself a gentle reminder that the bacterium, familiar to most readers from outbreak notices, exists in non-detrimental or even “mutualistic” forms as well as in disease-generating ones (Engelkirk and Duben-Engelkirk 159, 184).14 Consider, too, the reversal of the definitions of message and noise in the bacterium’s self-regulating mechanisms. George Church, who made a DNA recording of a textbook he co-authored, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (2012), explained his decision to work with “standalone DNA” on “commercial DNA microchips” (Leo, par. 10): “We purposefully avoided living cells…. In an organism, your message is a tiny fraction of the whole cell, so there’s a lot of wasted space. But more importantly, almost as soon as a DNA goes into a cell, if that DNA doesn’t earn its keep, if it isn’t evolutionarily advantageous, the cell will start mutating it, and eventually the cell will completely delete it” (qtd. in Leo, par. 10).15 As a trans-species project, Genesis may not make us fully see E. coli and other organisms as “égal” (our equal), as Noury suggests (153), but neither can the poet dismiss the host’s potential resistance to human expectations for a transgenic conversation.
Training skeptical readers to interrogate each code or narrative, to become attuned to the fine print of corporate advertisements and the noise of their own species preconceptions, and to explore “alternative views” of molecular biology (Telepresence 255)—including approaches that are less results-driven and more focused on the tangled communal and moral effects of transgenic “life” (252, 260)—is one aim of Kac’s poetic emphasis on noise in Genesis. He also concedes the limitations of this strategy. Transgenic or not, no poem can change research protocols; transgenic poets can only use the “ethical tension” in their projects to “stimulate[] reflection and debate” on broader human reconstructions of species and the environment (Telepresence 254-5).16 But within the constraints of the poetry genre, Kac insists on the artist’s responsibility to at least try to broaden the forms taken by such bioethical debates, particularly by taking “language” past “a human-centered form” (“Fifty Questions” 28), even as he acknowledges how hard it is not to fall back on humanistic vocabulary and concepts. Kac describes the slime mold in another one of his biopoems, The Eighth Day, in a “collaborative action” with human input, then breaks down the word to qualify that “amoeba and humans” may “‘co-labor,’ i.e., work in tandem,” but the amoeba doesn’t “‘know’” this (“Fifty Questions” 59).17
For now, perhaps the best route through Kac’s biopoetry is to read it not simply as noisy or “illegib[le]” in human linguistic terms, as Clüver suggests (184), but as a group of texts whose various components and audiences experience different degrees of noise and loss. Such noise is a reminder of artistic fallibility, foregrounding our fictions about communication more than our dialogic successes, as detailed in this pitch for bee poetry in “Biopoetry”: “Write and perform with a microrobot in the language of the bees, for a bee audience, in a semi-functional, semi-fictional dance” conveying no useful message about the locations of nectar for the insects. Another entry imagines two poem hosts from one microbe strain in a culture, “compet[ing] for the same resources,” leading to the possible loss of one poem in its entirety or to fresh texts via the noise of “horizontal poetic gene transfer.” In Genesis itself, Kac wonders exactly whose noisy intrusions are distracting whom: “am I, through an evolutionary process, a vehicle for [the bacteria’s] will to survive, contributing to the proliferation of bacteria by creating new ones?” (Telepresence 254). This question might be the springboard for Bök’s The Xenotext Experiment, which expands the transgenic poetry of parasitic language to encompass new forms as well as angry indictments of the human pollution of the earth.
The Xenotext Experiment: Human Elegies
As do Kac’s essays, Bök’s commentary on The Xenotext Experiment scrutinizes metaphors of speech or inscription such as “writing” and “response,” along with familiar wordplays on existing biological terms such as protein “express[ion]” and RNA “translat[ion]” (North of Invention, ch. 2). Bök is just as insistent as Kac in describing his transgenic texts as poems, even as he agrees that poetic language in the new millennium will not necessarily be confined to human forms and readers. “I often joke that we are probably the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write literature for a machinic audience of artificially intellectual peers,” Bök comments (“Poetic Machines”), and he speculates on the possibility of his Xenotext transgenic poems being sent through space as open letters to alien readers (“The Xenotext Experiment” 231).18 Yet the form Bök proposes for his transgenic poetry is different from Kac’s. Where Kac codes one text into DNA, Bök’s goal is to have his first nucleobased text, an original poem about new “life” forms and the poetic “lyre,” produce a second poem within a bacterium’s cellular processes to form two “mutually encipher[ing]” DNA-RNA transcription texts (North of Invention, ch. 2). Currently the paired-poem experiment succeeds with E. coli, though not yet with Bök’s intended final vehicle, the “extremophile” bacterium D. radiodurans (ch. 2).19
Kac and Bök also seem to have very different genre expectations for what transgenic poetry should do. While Genesis delights in noise and misrecognition as an end result, Bök’s The Xenotext Experiment, despite its defamiliarizing genetic ciphers, still stresses the need to be able to decode “intelligible,” “meaningful sentences” from the poems at its conclusion (North of Invention, ch. 2). And while Genesis is structured around loss and mutation, the Xenotext strives for perpetuity, evoking the much more traditional poetic goal of ensuring the author’s eternal reputation. Bök’s intended host, D. radiodurans, “can repair its own DNA so quickly that the germ resists mutation” (North of Invention, ch. 2), creating a poem that might “last until the sun dies” (Hill) in a “quest for immortality” (Collis), as the review headlines announce. Bök compares his transgenic poems to long-established forms such as “sonnets,” invoking the sonnet’s typical goal of preserving what humans love (North of Invention, ch. 2). His transgenic texts’ duration, if successful, would far exceed the promised reach of Shakespeare’s “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see” (187). Bök also places his transgenic texts within “the elegiac pastoral tradition” (North of Invention, ch. 2), where stylized constructions of nature help immortalize the subject, a “shepherd-poet” (Harrison 1-2). The elegy form promises that the deceased lyricist “lives on in” some afterlife, providing “an element of reassurance, of consolation” (Norlin 309), which seems a good parallel for Bök’s own artistic rearrangements of nature in service of human commemoration.20
Yet Bök’s project, perhaps even more sharply than Genesis, turns out to foreground unrecoverable loss and noise. It is not only that Bök extends the bacterium’s role in the poetic process, or that the poem’s translation to its second host is still imperfect. The association of language with loss is integrated into the poem at its fundamental thematic and structural levels. Bök’s study, ‘Pataphysics, references Serres’s parasitic noise (57), but the more direct muse for the Xenotext is William S. Burroughs, the science fiction language theorist who denounced “[t]he word” in The Ticket That Exploded (1967) as “a virus,” something “alien and hostile,” “a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system,” compelling us to speak (49-50).21 Infected with this noisy parasite, the humans in Burroughs’s texts themselves become increasingly parasitic and invasive. Here there are no gentle shepherds; Burroughs’s Ghost of Chance (1991) tallies instead the species extinctions and environmental havoc that humans cause as macro-parasites on “the planet as an organism” (18) until their violent word “virus” finishes “burning itself out” and most of its “Mad” speakers are destroyed (54). Bök asserts that his own transgenic poems “make literal” Burroughs’s equation of word and microbe (“The Xenotext Experiment” 229), and he mirrors Burroughs’s rage at human assaults on biocommunities. The result is that all stages of the Xenotext enact a very Burroughs-like tension between what the human author can do—”the badassness of poetry,” as Bök puts it in Species of Spaces—and the prospect of the loss of all human language, part of humans’ self-erasure as we poison the landscapes around us.22
It is the formal prowess of Bök’s poetry that readers notice first. Bök’s goal of producing “a machine for writing a poem in response” (Species of Spaces) echoes Burroughs’s vision of a “writing / machine,” though Bök works at the level of amino acids rather than with Burroughs’s “[g]reat sheets of magnetized print” (Ticket 62). Burroughs was known for his writing procedures, the use of “cut up[s],” “splices,” and “prerecorded” textual “substitut[ions]” to generate new semantics in passages (Ticket 207, 211, 205), but Bök’s poetic constraints in the Xenotext are far more extreme.23 In the transgenic poem pair, he has written the initial poem using only twenty of the letters in the English alphabet, linking each one of those letters to a specific codon, a “genetic triplet[] made by permuting the four nucleotides in DNA” (“Re: Buffalo Conference and Xenotext”; North of Invention, ch.2). Every codon is “an instruction for creating one of twenty amino acids used to make a sequence of protein” (North of Invention, ch. 2). Once the DNA poem is placed within the bacterium, the “DNA sequence” generates a “codependent” “messenger RNA sequence” for another set “of amino acids” (ch. 2). Each of those amino acids is again linked to one of the twenty letters to spell out the words for a second English poem (ch. 2). “[N]o poet in the history of poetics,” Bök states, “has ever actually imagined creating two texts that mutually encipher each other” in a live host (ch. 2). After many computer trials, he selected these letter matches for the double enciphering out of which he created his lipogrammic DNA and RNA poems:
alphabet: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
xenocode: t v u k y s p n o x d r w h i g z l f a c b m j e q(ch. 2)
Other parts of the project could also be described as studying alien codes; Wershler notes that its ciphering challenges are equaled by the “postgraduate level biology,” software experiments, and financial applications needed for the poet’s collaborations (56-7). For readers seeking guidance with the science, Bök prefaces the two transgenic texts with poems in a print volume, The Xenotext, Book 1 (2015), which both explains and makes art from the relevant biological processes by building “modular acrostic” poems from “atomic models for each of the amino acids” or DNA bases, and providing examples of protein folding by “misread[ing]” letters of a poetry line as protein components (154-6). Still other poems, intended for forthcoming companion volumes, catalogue the properties of the transgenic host, humans’ ecological footprint, and our desire for the feedback of another sentient species.
Bök is equally imaginative in trying to minimize the negative connotations of Burroughs’s parasite. He rereads Burroughs’s language virus as a source of creativity: “If the poet plays ‘host’ to the ‘germ’ of the word, then the poet may have to invent a more innovative vocabulary to describe this ‘epidemic’ called language” (“The Xenotext Experiment” 231). This reframing of Burroughs’s parasite metaphor is partly indebted to Christopher Dewdney. Dewdney’s “ominous conceit,” as Bök’s essay puts it, of “‘language…as a psychic parasite’” actually softens Burroughs’s parasite image (231). In his essay “Parasite Maintenance,” Dewdney briefly quotes Burroughs and states that “language” may not be “necessarily benevolent” (78-9). Yet Dewdney emphasizes that “living language exists in a symbiosis with the human ‘host’” in ways that can be “mutually beneficial” (79), arguing that poets’ brains have the added advantage of containing “the Parasite,” which he defines as “a special neural system” (75-6), “an internal structure generating novel configurations” in language (78) that expands ideas and senses “beyond” their usual constraints (90-1).24 Bök, in turn, insists that his own “‘xenotext’” is an artistic achievement for humans that remains neutral to its bacterial host: “a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose ‘alien words’ might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form” (“The Xenotext Experiment” 229).
And yet, for all Bök’s claims of coexistence, the destructive valence of Burroughs’s parasite is hard to forget. In Word Cultures, Robin Lydenberg reminds us that for Burroughs the human “language parasite” (18) is neither beautiful nor “‘harmless’” (122); it is a horrible infestation that the author must “expos[e] and exhaust[],” with all formal innovations geared toward that end (137).25 Language is indeed the parasite that transforms its hosts into parasites: “To name, for Burroughs, is virtually to obliterate humanity and individual will, to reduce the individual to a hungry orifice, an empty sucking hole,” and “[r]epresentation” is “a lethal symbiosis which reduces the world to a ‘copy planet,’ a false and lifeless imitation” (Lydenberg 40). The villains in Burroughs’s 1960s Nova trilogy embed noisily dissonant language texts in human hosts in an attempt to blast the earth. The ecological motifs in Burroughs’s post-1980 texts further contextualize his hatred of language. Ghost of Chance depicts language as a synecdoche for everything dangerous about humans, a facet of the murderous “Ugly Spirit” that haunts Burroughs’s texts (48). “Homo Sap,” he writes, “can make information available through writing or oral tradition to other Sap humans” (48), embodying a language tied to “war, exploitation, and slavery” (49), as well as to the eradication of nonhumans, which he describes at length in atypically poignant images. “Bulldozers are destroying the rain forests, the cowering lemurs and flying foxes, the singing Kloss’s gibbons, which produce the most beautiful and variegated music of any land animal,” he writes, as if to underscore the contrast between the lyricism of the nonhuman and the noisy violence of human “enemies of the planet,” whose “name is legion” (18-19).26 Ghost of Chance‘s narrator employs a longstanding catchphrase of Burroughs’s texts: “one is tempted to say, as Brion Gysin did, ‘Rub out the word‘” (49).
Like Burroughs, Bök finds little to praise in the few human “artifacts” likely to be noted “after tens of millions of years”: the “mass extinction” of other species, “climate change,” and “nuclear waste” (North of Invention, Q & A). When Bök cites the exigency of saving something more of “our cultural heritage against planetary disasters” (“The Xenotext Experiment” 228), he refers not only to the distant prospect of the sun’s death but to nearer possibilities like “nuclear war” (North of Invention, ch. 3, 2) and crop loss due to the harm done to bees by insecticides (The Xenotext, Book 1 23). It is no surprise that Burroughs’s frightening images of human parasites and parasitic language affect both Bök’s encoded poem pair for the bacterium and the accompanying poems Bök writes about that process, texts that include direct rewrites of Burroughs’s virus remarks (e.g., the anagrammatic rearrangement of “Language is a virus from outer space” into “Language tapers our vicious frames” [Species of Spaces]) and which are marked by their own forms of loss and noise, as well as by a sense of the limits of poetry’s cultural critiques.
Each of the two current texts Bök intends to be generated by “poet” and “germ” has fourteen lines. These “abbreviated Petrarchan sonnets,” as he describes them (North of Invention, ch. 2), are the ghostly foundation text to his first book on the project, since they have been read at lectures but will be published formally only in a later book. Apart from the sonnet structure, he models their pairing on a Renaissance “pastoral” exchange, though one whose opening topic is romance rather than explicit elegy: Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Walter Ralegh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (ch. 2). As Bök’s use of “abbreviated” suggests, there is metrical and linguistic loss in his elliptical sonnets. The difficulties of double-coding foreclose a sonnet’s iambic pentameter or consistent rhyme, limiting each line to two to four words, and precluding as well the range of wordplay in the Marlowe-Ralegh tetrameter quatrains. Here, too, as in Kac’s Genesis, the poetry is visually reduced to a color marker, this time “cell[s]” that “glow red in the dark” to show the bacterium’s response protein (ch. 2). The fact that Bök’s microbe produces only the match words prompted by the poet’s DNA coding also structurally foregrounds a sense of absence in the response mechanism.
These absences are thematically echoed as the Xenotext poems, like Genesis, ponder the potential losses incurred by their technical achievement, moving from lyric appeal to elegiac lament for both human artists and manipulated organisms. Where the poet’s sonnet is a “masculine assertion about the aesthetic creation of life,” Bök explains, the bacterium’s sonnet is “a feminine refutation about the woebegone absence of life” (ch. 2). The gender clichés recall the way Mary Shelley’s male scientist violates the feminized “nature” he had “pursued…to her hiding-places” in order to make a new creature (54), with Bök now grafting Dr. Frankenstein onto Marlowe’s shepherd, who reduced nature’s bounty to adornments to seduce a lover.27 Both nature and the human are diminished in the process, Bök suggests, as he cuts down the poet-shepherd-reshaper to a puerile “herdboy,” addressing the bacterium as a lost Nabokovian “nymphet” (North of Invention, ch. 2). At best, the poet is still “‘Orpheus’” to the bacterium’s “‘Eurydice,’” whom he loses, presumably, by his need to scrutinize her too “insistent[ly]” (The Xenotext, Book 1 150, 67). The vision of losing or diminishing other organisms, and of our inability to avoid the noise of cultural stereotypes, reminds us to proceed with caution in developing this new poetic form, and is perhaps another reason that Bök selects such an imperishable host.
Poet (DNA encoded text)
any style of life
is prim
oh stay
my lyre
with wily ploys
moan the riff
the riff
of any tune aloud
moan now my fate
in fate
we rely
my my
thnow is the word
the word of life
Germ (RNA encoded text)
the faery is rosy
of glow
in fate
we rely
moan more grief
with any loss
any loss
is the achy trick
with him we stay
oh stay
my lyre
we wean
him of any milk
any milk is rosy
(North of Invention, ch. 2. Transgenic poems reprinted by permission of Christian Bök.)
The language of the poet’s sonnet is indeed self-important and insistent. Despite its reference to “moan[ing],” the octave celebrates human ingenuity as an art of “wily ploys” with an individualized “riff.” The “stay” in lines 3-4, “oh stay / my lyre,” is ambiguous, a call for either lyric persistence or for silence, though the former seems better suited to the delight of making “any tune aloud” invoked in line 8. Where the first line, “any style of life,” evokes the possibility of different living media and lifestyles, the phrase “is prim” in the second line suggests a desire for decorous form. The piece suggests that it is the poet’s form that wins. The sonnet is possessive about “my lyre,” emphasizing the personal form of composition, and the concern with “my fate” in the sestet precedes and overshadows the collective resignation of “in fate / we rely” in lines 10-11. “[M]y myth,” dramatically isolated in the twelfth line, “now is the word” in the next line; that “word,” moreover, concludes the poem as “the” singular “word of life.” This language of dominion recalls Adrienne Rich’s “book of myths / in which / our names”—the names of feminized others or outsiders—”do not appear” (164).
Both the context and themes of the bacterium’s poem deflate the first sonnet’s masculinist bravado.28 Ralegh’s nymph had already challenged the pastoral notion of a sheltering or humanized nature and indicted poetic “wil[es],” as the DNA text might put it, reminding the shepherd that words can deceive (“If all the world and love were young, / And truth in every shepherd’s tongue” [105]) and that living forms die (“Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten” [106]), the very antithesis of the lasting text Bök wishes to achieve. The first lines of Bök’s bacterial poem undercut the new shepherd further; the reference to “faery” tales in “the faery is rosy / of glow” acknowledges, but may also critique, the poet’s fanciful creations. The Petrarchan cliché of “rosy” beauty gets reworked as an allusion to the experiment’s intended red hue, but neither human interposition nor nature is necessarily “benign” here (“The Xenotext Experiment” 229). Bök states in his essay that his “‘word-germ’ has only the most miniscule [sic], most negligible, chance whatsoever of producing any dangerous contagion” (231), at the same time the word “rosy” in the bacterium’s poem hints, like ambient noise, at “Ring around the rosy,” the children’s lyric purportedly based on our historical encounter with the bacterium Y. pestis, the cause of the Black Death.29
“[M]ilk” itself becomes “rosy” in the last line of the bacterium’s poem, as if mingled with blood, creating visions of wounding and nursing in the same image. This poem does “moan more grief,” as the fifth line suggests, focusing on absence and lack at the communal level. There is no personal “my fate” here, only a repetition of the lack of control in “in fate / we rely,” which comes well before the image of “my lyre” in the eleventh line. Artifice is something that costs the artist, becoming an “achy trick” attached to “any loss.” The antecedent for “him” in “with him we stay” in the ninth line is not specified. If it refers to the masculine scientist-poet, does “stay”—followed by a second repeated stanza from the poet’s sonnet—underscore that the bacterium’s “lyre” really belongs to the poet? Or is there some counter-creation in which the bacterium usurps his lyre? Whomever “h[e]” refers to in the bacterium’s poem, he moves from possible lover to child in the three closing lines, where “any milk is rosy,” but “we wean / him of any milk.” Serres asks whether the baby “whom the mother carried, who sucked at her breast” should be considered “a parasite” (78); questions about children who can no longer be nursed, or children who turn against their nurturers, grow more vexed in the Xenotext project as Bök addresses human incursions on the planet.
Where Kac’s Genesis raises implicit questions about what the nonhuman poetic host signifies, Bök directly uses the physiology of his transgenic texts’ intended host to interrogate human incursions. “The Extremophile,” a companion prose poem intended for a later Xenotext volume, shows D. radiodurans or other extremophiles flourishing not only in the harshest natural environments on “Earth” or in “outer space” (20)—no seductive pastoral charms here—but also in the worst human-polluted landscapes. A sample extremophile in his composite portrait “feeds on concrete,” and Bök’s catalogue of opportunistic organisms expands rapidly, like an avalanche of noisy interpolations of the transgenic poems’ ellipses: “It breeds, unseen, inside canisters of hairspray” (“The Extremophile” 17); “It feeds on polyethylene”; “It thrives in the acidic runoff from heavy-metal mines, depleted of their zinc”; “It eats jet fuel” (18); “It feeds on nylon byproducts”; and “It dwells in a tide pool of battery acid” (19). The organisms’ feedings increase with seeming relish as we move from “byproducts” to more dramatic industrial accidents: “It gorges on plumes of petroleum, venting from the wellhead of the Deepwater Horizon” (19), “It resides inside the core of Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl” (20), and “It is ideally adapted to eat hot graphite in the ruins of Unit 2 at Three Mile Island” (21).
Here our pollutants create an alien, synthetic ecology—”acidic runoff” and “tide pool of battery acid” amid “the ruins of” our culture—where extremophiles might “thrive[],” adding entry after entry to the list poem, precisely because they are “totally inhuman” (23). These images go further than Burroughs; they recall Philip K. Dick in “Planet for Transients,” a short story in which the last fully human survivors of a nuclear war realize that they have reshaped the earth into an irradiated “jungle” of evolved creatures, “‘Countless forms adapted to this Earth—this hot Earth,’” whose atmosphere and nutrients are now poison to the prior inhabitants (338).30 This is “wean[ing]” with a vengeance, or with poetic justice. Here there is no coy courtship, sentimental maternity, or vision of transgenic dialogue; an extremophile, as Bök states bluntly in his poem, “does not love you. It does not need you. It does not even know that you exist” (“The Extremophile” 23).
“The Extremophile” gives a far from “rosy” picture of that human lifestyle even within the human community. Its pictures of eco-destruction also read like a manifest of war crimes and atrocities from the twentieth century and beyond. One extremophile “thrives in the topsoil of battlefields contaminated with toxic doses of lead” (20), and others remain alive in “the firebombing of Dresden” (17), “the conflagration during the collapse of the World Trade Center” (21), “the incineration of Hiroshima” (22), “the crucibles of Treblinka” (21), and “the tornados of hellfire, raging, unchecked, in the oil fields of Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War” (19). For the Xenotext‘s Orpheus, hell is always ignited by humans as we parasite one another. It is hard to read the thundering rhythms of the lists in “The Extremophile” without beginning to root for a nonhuman successor. Perhaps our previous poems, Bök suggests, chose the wrong species to commemorate.
Such deep ambivalence about poetry’s place and perdurability against this catalogue of wrongdoing continues throughout the text. Bök closes the poem with a statement that seems to inspire human creativity: the extremophile “awaits your experiments” in science or poetics (23). He has argued that the text can be read as an “allegory” for the power “of poetry,” a craft that might survive our destructiveness (Species of Spaces). At the same time, however, the acts of censorship the poem mentions (“the furnaces reserved for The Satanic Verses after the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah of Iran” [20] or “the Nazi bonfires at the Opernplatz in Berlin” [18]) suggest that we have already begun a nightmarish purging of our language and creativity, an appalling parody of Burroughs’s “‘Rub out the word’” (Ghost of Chance 49) or Serres’s image of a text “burnt” to confound the “parasite” (253). “What poetry can we imagine,” Bök asks in “The Perfect Malware,” another poem from an upcoming Xenotext print book, “when poetry itself has gone extinct” and we are left with only noise and ash, “the soot of our burnt books,” to scan (8)?
Neither Burroughs nor Bök ever fully abandons the word germ in his own texts, a fact that Bök reflects in the sardonic title of “The Perfect Malware,” a piece he describes, only half-jokingly, as the “best poem I’ve ever written in the course of my entire career” (Species of Spaces). Wikipedia defines “malware,” or “malicious software,” as made “to disrupt computer operations, gather sensitive information,” or “gain access to private computer systems” (“Malware,” par. 1). Here poetry becomes deliberately subversive noise, an interruption that might bring down a system entirely—but what is being subverted or rewritten? At times the “it” of the lists in “The Perfect Malware” does seem close to Burroughs’s malevolent language germ, “infecting us, like a virus” (13) and spreading our violence across the ecosystem: “It sings an orison to itself in Hell, calling all thinking machines to embrace its madness. It teaches us to kill…. It is a tombstone for our sentience” (9). But other lines plead for new poetic markers, perhaps in reference to the transgenic poems or to the self-interrogations of this print poem with its repeated queries of “Who am I?” (15), to challenge such a fixed course: “Must we bequeath to the darkness all the bright tokens of what we know?” (11). The “malware” of the poem’s penultimate line (15) is not quite the pernicious language virus that identifies and consumes, nor the vision of language fading “into thin air” at the end of Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded (217). If Bök echoes Burroughs’s “silence / to say / good bye” (Ticket 183), it is to give “The Perfect Malware” something more tentatively open, “like the voice of a child, saying goodbye in the dark,” longing for a response, though unsure of whether it will come in the hoped-for form of human acts to stop the loss of species he describes—”the fey imp in all living things” about “to be destroyed”—or only in the form of alien signs after the planet’s “swelling fireball” (14-5). The child’s voice recalls the child abruptly being weaned in the Xenotext RNA poem, and might be an apt figure for the early stages of transgenic poetry itself.
Bök’s Xenotext, even more markedly than Kac’s Genesis, offers cross sections of a transgenic poetry form in transition, aware of its noise and fallacies. This new poetry chafes against generic and genetic limits (“We were never intended to be tied to whatever made us” [The Xenotext, Book 1 146]) that it is sometimes forced to acknowledge. Kac’s biopoetry battles against the restrictions of human language through projects that are still quintessentially human intellectual experiments, including his theorization of a poetics of noise and genetic mutation. For Bök, the final problem with the transgenic poem may not be its manipulation of nature but its limits as an elegiac vessel. This is not only because his full text currently cannot be read in D. radiodurans. Bök describes his transgenic poems’ “character” in curiously anti-monumental terms, as “very fragile” and different from his usual style (“Teaching myself molecular biochemistry”). His supplementary print poems have to step in to document ecological losses—”the omnicide of the world” and “our own extinction” (The Xenotext, Book 1 17, 74)—in powerfully eloquent sequences too lengthy to be encoded for a DNA-RNA pair structure or perhaps to be encoded reliably at all across generations of a life form. Nor is Bök certain about the existence of alien readers to translate our transgenic messages. “The Perfect Malware” might be addressing those elusive or illusive readers: “I know that nowhere, among these glowing nebulae, do any of you exist” (15). Orpheus’s fierce love letter is written not only to the nature we are destroying but to human poetry itself, giving a passionate look backward at all the older forms whose language games might still be lost as noise after the deaths of their authors and readers. In this fashion, The Xenotext, Book 1 elegizes, in addition to the classical “pastoral,” the “[v]irelay,” the “nocturne,” the Shakespearean and “alexandrine sonnet,” the “acrostic,” the “catalogue” poem (151-6), and concretist-influenced visual typography, as well as Bök’s work in earlier texts like Crystallography (1994, 2003), which also features chemical compound-based generative devices. The noise and toxins of the present actively destabilize the poetic past in “Colony Collapse Disorder,” a “feast” of translation/misreading where Bök gradually “‘transmut[es]’” the verbal nuances of a book of Virgil’s Georgics into a dirge for the “impoverishments” of beehives caused by the latest human “pesticide[s]” (46, 60, 23).
What is poetry’s role in this “impoverish[ed]” climate? For all their differences, the Xenotext and Kac’s Genesis ask similar questions: is the poet’s job only to mourn or critique in reflecting on the technological state of the art? Can transgenic poetry make any interventions in bioethics or any difference to its readers? Kac sees transgenic poems and other aesthetic gene experiments, despite their noise, as still offering the chance for “healthy” and “beautiful chimeras and fantastic new living systems,” though he insists that unless they are “loved and nurtured,” especially with multicellular hosts, any hope of the poetry’s “Ethical” component will fail (Telepresence 243). Bök wants to believe that poetry’s critiques might offer something “curative” (Species of Spaces), a call to rethink “our only legacy to the future” (North of Invention, Q &A), but he remains more skeptical of our caretaking potential. Despite Bök’s genetic experiments, the speaker in The Xenotext, Book 1 still worries that violence is unchangeably “embedded in our genomes” (19), and that the most vivid elegy for our future losses, or those of the earth, may not stop them from happening. In the Xenotext‘s love poetry, our affections are always insufficient. Bök’s “Virgil greets us at the Gates of Death to tell us that we love our lovers, but never enough to bring them back from Hell,” and that “we have damned our children to leave the fallout shelter” (74). While he insists on the need to keep experimenting with new poetic forms to protest that outcome (“And yet, I must let loose, upon the world, my perfect malware”), the poems also leave open the possibility that transgenic poetry and its print counterparts may simply become a better way of detailing our spoliations, “our excursion from the ovum to the void” (“The Perfect Malware” 15, 11). Instead of Marlowe’s shepherd’s call to “Come live with me and be my love” in a halcyon poetic fabrication of nature (185), Bök offers the reader a starker invitation in bleaker landscapes, quietly dropping the promise of shared “love and life”: “Come with me, and let me show you how to break my heart” (The Xenotext, Book 1 151, 19).
Notes
1. Davis describes Max Delbrück’s original puzzle, “a DNA model constructed of 174 toothpicks in four different colors,” in “linguistic” terms, speculating that “scientists” had “waxed just a little bit poetic” when they thought the arbitrary link between signifier and referent mirrored the link between “triplet codon” and “amino acid” (259). For other transgenic texts, see Kac’s Move 36 (2004), which codes the Descartes quotation “‘Cogito ergo sum’” as a “‘Cartesian gene’” introduced into a plant, alongside a gene to make the foliage curve (Kac, “Life Transformation” 177), and Cypher (2009), “a DIY transgenic kit” housing artificially engineered DNA that translates a brief science fiction-themed “poem,”
“ATAGGEDCATWILLATTACKGATTACA.” The audience can “transform[] E. coli” by adding the poem-DNA (Cypher). Bök describes the “Synthia” bacterium, which Craig Venter implanted with DNA “that enciphered a quote from [James Joyce’s] A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life’” (North of Invention, ch. 1), and notes current and future DNA text projects in plants in The Xenotext, Book 1 (113, 115).
2. Such tropes, Roof notes, historically have been used to foster the illusion of “a hyperbolic sense of agency and control” and to justify biased “pseudoscience” about “race, gender, and sexual orientation” (3, 13). Megan Fernandes references Roof’s speculation on biopolitics and poetics in an essay that mentions Kac’s Genesis, though she deals more deeply with poetry that uses transgenics at a thematic level, rather than a formal one.
3. While Genesis seems to allow a nonhuman organism to effect incalculable changes in the bible quotation (Telepresence 252), scholars debate whether the artist does, in fact, truly cede “dominion” in this text. The fact that the “unpredictable” microbes “continue to mutate even when the UV light does not shine,” Hayles states, undermines “human agency” to an extent, although she questions whether the “‘artist’s gene’” implantation ultimately upholds that agency, and whether Genesis “critique[s]” or “reinscribe[s]” the idea “that flesh can be reduced to data” (“Who Is in Control Here?” 86, 83-84). On the issue of control and its ethics in Kac’s bio art, see also Steve Baker, Dominique Moulon (“Fifty Questions”), Mathieu Noury, Matthew Causey, Gunalan Nadarajan, Steve Tomasula (“Gene(sis)”), Fernandes, Yunjin La-mei Woo, and Carol Becker, who also queries whether the debate over dominion Kac provokes will alter our ecopractices (43).
4. “For subsequent versions,” Kac adds, “I created exclusively green fluorescent bacteria” (Telepresence 262).
5. Following Kac, Hugues Marchal finds Genesis poetic for its “creation” of new forms with and outside of the “‘verbal,’” as well as its “critical stance” toward scientific praxis (76), while Tomasula compares Genesis‘s processes to OuLiPo poetic generative devices (“Gene(sis)” 255). Claus Clüver sees Kac’s definitions of both media poetry and biopoetry encouraging texts that “approach[] illegibility” (179), yet he still suggests that Genesis is a poem only because of the use of the bible sentence (184), even as he asks whether the E. coli should be considered “transmitters of signs” or “the sign” itself (181). He does note that other Kac biopoetry plans involving “‘language’” in “non-human” species go “beyond” the genre challenges of prior poetic innovations such as Dada texts (184).
6. Kac insists on the “direct relationship between my books and my artworks” (“Fifty Questions” 78). Since bio installations depend so much on authorial comments to explain their methods to an audience, Jens Hauser argues, their “Paratexts” might be considered examples of needed textual “Parasitism or Biocenosis” of linked organisms (93-4). Noury details Kac’s use of “communication” and “dialogical interaction” in these paratexts (see Kac, Telepresence 218; Noury 132-3), discussing Genesis‘s commercial lab work, Internet use, the relation between the artist’s gene and the information in the rest of the organism, and the Petri culture plasmid exchanges between bacteria with the Genesis gene and the ones lacking it (Noury 131-8), as well as Kac’s analysis of “Telecommunications” and Baudrillard’s “‘hyperreal’” (Kac, Telepresence 141; Noury 142-3). Noury mentions noise in the context of self-organization and second-order cybernetics (149), but looks more at how Kac anticipates the posthuman and transhuman (179) than at Kac’s creation of purposely flawed or nontransparent transmissions.
7. David Hunt, though he focuses less on details of Genesis‘s language, also finds Kac keenly “suspicious of metaphors” such as “[t]he genome as a book,” especially “reduce[d]” to a seemingly closed print volume (par. 1-2). He praises Genesis‘s “open-ended,” “hypertext”-style “process” (par. 3-4) involving “multiple perspectives through multiple languages,” taking fluctuating, “provisional forms,” and arriving at a “state of perpetual ‘unfinish’” that disrupts the “heavy totalitarian cadences” present in “language as a tool of ideology” (par. 6-8).
8. Clüver argues that the very abundance of Genesis‘s visual and sound “multimedia” and “intermedia” forums reminds us that we cannot see the bacterial text without “translation,” and that, if we lack the scientific background, we may not know how to interpret what we do see (181-3). Cary Wolfe notes W.J.T. Mitchell’s claim that Kac’s bio texts foreground “‘the invisibility of the genetic revolution,’” but asserts that “Kac’s work also exploits” deliberately “our lust for the visual” to show the limits of “human (and humanist) visuality” (What Is Posthumanism? 162-4).
9. As Serres scholars point out, “parasite” in French can also denote “static or interference” (Wolfe, “Bring the Noise” xiii). See, too, Wolfe on Serres’s premise that “‘Nonfunctioning remains essential for functioning’” and its effect on his theory of interdisciplinary “‘translation’” and his call to “‘rewrite a system’” based on “‘differences, noise, and disorder,’” so that, as Wolfe notes, “noise is productive and creative” (xiii-xiv). Dworkin’s analysis of noise’s “necessary” role in Serres’s communication theory reminds us, conversely, that the noisiest composition “cannot ever completely escape from the republic of signification” (46-8).
10. In his introduction to the first edition of Media Poetry, Kac cites “the formal conquests of” Language poetry and related vanguard texts, while still emphasizing the need to leave behind paper-based page art (11).
11. Darren Wershler’s article on The Xenotext Experiment as a “boundary object[]” in “media art” and “communication studies” (43-4) suggests the need for reading noise in transgenic poems; without citing Serres directly, he mentions the noncommunicative aspects of language (“language is inherently excessive and routinely frustrates any attempts to fix meaning” [58]) when transgenic authors transform “what it means to write poetry” (46). In an effort to show the innovations of Bök’s Xenotext, however, Wershler deemphasizes the noise of Kac’s Genesis, reading it more “as a storage container for pre-existing texts,” and notes Bök’s critique of Genesis as insufficiently transformative of the host (48-9).
12. Robert Mitchell sees this expansiveness as part of the bio art genre: “though one initially encounters most vitalist bioartworks as though they were discrete and concrete objects with clear borders, many of these same works are designed to produce a subsequent confusion about the precise borders of the work of art and to encourage a sense that both the origin and future of the work of art remain indeterminate and open” (85).
13. Tomasula also discusses textual “inconsistencies” and “contradictory stories” in the vocal and early written stages of the bible’s Genesis as a “myth” that stayed “open,” “turning into new versions of itself,” a format Kac mirrors, he argues, in letting present-day viewers affect the Genesis sentence (“Gene(sis)” 252-3). Wolfe notes Kac’s subversion of the idea of an “authoritative,” direct “‘voice of God’” by stressing the King James Bible as “‘a translation of many translations’” and observes more generally “the disjunction of meaning” from “language” produced by Genesis‘s switches in “texts/codes” that challenge “the dream of translation” as “complete transparency between one language and another” and the implied “‘dominion’” within “that notion of language”—another argument for focusing on textual noise, though he does not read specific letter changes in the Genesis sentence beyond their “nonsensical” status (244-7). Rebecca Sanchez notes the “embodied” “semantic slippage” of controlling “‘man’” and “movement” in the first Genesis show sentence (150); Kac briefly ponders “the noise” of the “EON”/”AAN” changes in terms of “‘time’” or gender (“Genesis: A Transgenic Artwork” 19); and Anna Gibbs, in an overview of book format “translation[s],” notes Genesis‘s broad focus on “instability and unreliability,” qualities that she sees the Xenotext trying to oppose. In contrast, see Rosemary Lee on Bök’s Xenotext and Kac’s “Biopoetry,” both read under an epigraph of Burroughs’s virus remark. Even if certain Kac experiments “mutate” or are “closed to human reception,” Lee argues, Kac and Bök, as “cross-disciplinary” poets of the “non-human,” still try “to faithfully translate information from one system of coding into another” (1, 3, 6).
14. Kac’s website essay on Genesis states that its nonpathogenic E. coli type, “JM101,” is “safe to use in public and [is] displayed in the gallery with the UV source in a protective transparent enclosure” (par. 3). Bök’s vessel, D. radiodurans, is also a “nonpathogen[]” (Saier 1129).
15. Robert Majzels asserts via linguistic metaphor that a transgenic artist “interrupts the [organism]’s speech” (par. 10). Clüver cites Kac’s sense of the bacterium’s “‘internal interests as a living creature’” in Genesis (182) and Hayles mentions the “irresistible mandates” of its “biological processes,” as well as the bio research history of another organism in Kac’s The Eighth Day (“Who Is in Control Here?” 84, 80)—though not in the context of noise. Adam Dickinson argues that the mutations effected by the radiation in Genesis should be seen as “damaging the organism” (141), though he praises Bök’s The Xenotext Experiment as “nonviolent” (145).
16. Tomasula agrees with Kac that Genesis makes us weigh the “consequences not always foreseen, nor benign” of “interfering with evolution” or of our environmental pollution (“Gene(sis)” 255).
17. Hayles sees “‘collaboration’” as potentially too anthropomorphic for Genesis as well, because the microorganisms “did not agree to the arrangement,” and she finds the “conversations” in Kac’s other bio art largely “symbolic,” emphasizing differences “between human and nonhuman” perception (“Who Is in Control Here?” 84-5). To depict the relations among “a plant,” “a bird,” and “humans” in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1994), Kac paraphrases Humberto Maturana’s idea of “consensual domains: shared spheres of perception, cognition and agency in which two or more sentient beings (human or otherwise) can negotiate their experience dialogically” (“Trans-Genesis”), though Maturana seems to have adapted the term “consensual” from a human context, describing “a domain of coordinated behavior…that is indistinguishable from a domain of consensus established between human beings” (“Cognition” 42-3). The Xenotext Experiment provokes similar questions about how to describe the bacterium’s role. Wershler refers to it as both “collaborator” and “co-author” (50), while Dickinson calls it “colleague” and “symbiont,” stating that the Xenotext exemplifies, in Don McKay’s terms, “‘an address to the other with an acknowledgement of our human-centredness built in, a salutary and humbling reminder’” (145). Nikki Skillman argues, in contrast, that the bacterial poem is only “ventriloquism” (262).
18. For a discussion of scientific conjectures that aliens could have tried this previously with genetic data in viruses, see Bök (“The Xenotext Experiment” 228 and North of Invention, ch. 1) as well as Wershler (47-8). “Who is this message for?” Wershler asks of the Xenotext; “Will they ever find it? Does it matter?” (58). “[I]f a poem is written in the vacuum of space and there’s no human there to read it,” Tomasula adds, “is it still a poem?” (“Introduction” 3). Kenneth Goldsmith describes the transgenic poetry as “the most unreadable text of all,” given its microscopic size and “alien” audience (170). Majzels wonders whether the bacteria, “these tiny organisms are in fact the aliens, the xenos who have always been here reciting long strings of generative poems to each other while humans are busy murdering each other?” (par. 10).
19. Bök writes in June 2014, “I have performed assays on the extremophile, and I have managed to integrate the gene into the chromosome; the organism fluoresces in response, as expected, but it keeps destroying the resulting protein, before the entire mass of the molecule can be detected, meaning that we cannot read the poem before it is metabolized. I have to figure out how to make the poem more stable in this environment. I have managed to get the construct to work definitively in E. coli—but I have promised to get the poem to function in the unkillable bacterium” (“Re: Xenotext”).
20. Iain Twiddy discusses the “artificial” quality of nature portrayals in pastoral elegies and the adaptation of this quality in modern poems about human ecological impact, whether the focus is on a person or whether an “aspect of nature is itself the subject being mourned” (3-5).
21. Robin Lydenberg finds strong similarities between the parasite philosophies of Burroughs and Serres, namely the concept of “the parasite” as “‘always already’” found in “language” and society, the undercutting of the “parasite/host” division, the drive “to exorcize the parasite” from “body and writing,” and the belief that “the parasite is the archetype of all relations of power; but it is also the agent of change which disrupts those relations” (127, 130). David Ingram briefly mentions Serres’s theory of “‘one-way relations’” to explain Burroughs’s vision of “media control” and evokes Serresian “noise” to describe Burroughs’s “cut-ups” that can “both subvert and renew that system” (101, 110). Arndt Niebisch also cites Serres’s idea of “feedback as a parasitical structure” (par. 2) to read Burroughs’s “cut-ups” and “recordings” (par. 9).
22. Douglas Luman notes initially the “hopeless” tenor of the Xenotext‘s “pastoral” transgenic poems that will survive “our own fragility” and “likely disappearance,” yet that cannot reverse that absence or the other “extinction[s]” we have caused (par. 7, 9, 6, 4). He briefly links this eco-“damage” to “systems of action brought into being by our own will in language,” but he sees The Xenotext, Book 1‘s “elegiac” tone, in its last text, as “reassuring” us about poetry’s afterlife with “a new way into creation” (par. 4, 8, 11). I argue that as a group Bök’s Xenotext poems are more qualified about the survival and memorializing effect of poetry. See, too, Eleanor Gold on the book’s imagery of “apocalyptic destruction” for “the Anthropocene” (par. 3), Michael Leong on the text’s multiple “translation[s]” of environmental “Apocalypse” (248-9), and Frank Davey on “Recovery and loss” in a text “doubtful of its political usefulness” (par. 4, 1).
23. Bök scholarship focuses intensively on the poet’s generative devices. See Brian Kim Stefans’s essays, Perloff (“The Oulipo Factor”), Jean-Philippe Marcoux’s Eunoia articles, and texts by Jerome McGann, Robert David Stacey, Brent Wood, Gibbs, and Sean Braune (“Enantiomorphosis” and “The Meaning Revealed”). Stephen Voyce’s interview with Bök covers numerous stated and unstated guidelines in the poet’s texts, with an extended section on the titular project. See, too, Braune on the attempt to create a Burroughsian “living clinamen” in the Xenotext (“From Lucretian Atomic Theory” 177-8). Wershler describes in detail the codes, computer resources, and models Bök used in The Xenotext Experiment (49-54).
24. Bök explains that Dewdney’s “Parasite” is a helpful entity combatting another symbiont, “the Governor,” “that regulates” words and ideas: “The Governor unveils the power of language over us; the Parasite reveals the power of language in us” (‘Pataphysics 95, 116).
25. For Burroughs’s efforts to thwart the language virus, see Priscilla Wald on “his ‘cut-up[s]’” as self-“‘inoculation’” against the otherwise unseen parasite (185-6). Lydenberg traces Burroughs’s stylistic “violence” from his “metonymic” play and “holes” in passages in Naked Lunch (43) to his print intercuts, “experiments with tape recorders and film” (44), “found texts” (105), “fold-in[s]” (43), “simultaneous multiple texts” (45), and, ultimately, his call for “silence” (114). See, too, Ihab Hassan on Burroughs’s “montage,” Dada poetics, and “splice[s]” (9) in “a deposition against the human race” (4) as “‘Virus’” (13), using “desiccated, automatic” phrasing whose “final aim is self-abolition” (8). Timothy Murphy discusses Burroughs’s “elegiac” “(anti-) narrative” in the “‘silence to say goodbye’” (136-7), while Ingram studies the influence of Alfred Korzybski’s semantic theory on Burroughs’s techniques such as “non-linear” glyphs to fight ingrained “verbal controls” (95, 98). Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman, analyzes Burroughs’s use of tape recordings both compositionally and in his descriptions of “‘writing machine[s],’” his fear that his own virus-“destabiliz[ing]” texts might “become infectious in turn,” and his interest in “noise” as well as “silence” (214-6, 219). Todd Tietchen reads the “cut-ups” as “disrupting the signifying chains of ideological language” toward “a liberating silence” (120) in an example of Mark Dery’s definition of “‘Culture Jamming,’” where artists “‘introduce noise into the system as it passes from transmitter to receiver’” (114).
26. See, too, Chad Weidner on Ghost of Chance‘s images of “‘deforestation, pandemic pollution,’” and “entire species” wiped out by humans (“‘The Great God Pan’” 200-01); on the book as an “Ecological Elegy” (195), “an obituary” for “the earth” (204); and on the book’s “softer,” “more accessible” language (197). See also Weidner’s extended discussion of the book’s indictment of “‘The Ugly Spirit…in Homo Sap, the Ugly Animal’” (The Green Ghost 136-57). Barry Miles also observes the environmentalism of Burroughs’s final texts, quoting the excerpt from Ghost of Chance about “‘the planet as an organism’” being “destroyed by humanity” (253-4), and states that Captain Mission’s interaction with lemurs features “some of Burroughs’s most tender and exquisite writing” (244).
27. Oana Avasilichioaei juxtaposes similar quotations about “nature”‘s “hiding-places” from Frankenstein with Bök’s descriptions of the Xenotext.
28. Tony Hill concurs that the RNA poem counters the “machissimo” in the poet’s sonnet (par. 5), Wershler finds the poet’s text/implantation “hubristic” (51), and Alexander Kim also notes “the hubris of the poet’s project” in “Orpheus,” “while Eurydice responds to its arrogance” (par. 10). Gregory Betts sees a “Promethean” pride in the Xenotext‘s bid for poetic “immortality” (50-1). Skillman, discussing the “elegiac” quality of the poem pair, notes “the expressive, improvised ‘riff’ of artistic will” and “ambitious” “boasts” of the first sonnet and the response’s “apocalyptic, melancholy” sense “of human loss” (265-6), though with generally different interpretations than mine of the lines’ wordplay. Dan Disney looks briefly at “homophonic” play in the pair that “proclaims our imminent/immanent absence” (411, 408).
29. Iona and Peter Opie recognize the widespread, though probably mistaken, idea of the song’s plague roots (221-3). A.M. Juster, perhaps overcautiously, questions the “‘benign’” status of even E. coli experiments.
30. Wershler also cites Dick as a potential influence on the Xenotext, though he references a different story and premise (58).
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