The Text Festival (Part 2) April 27, 2011: The Text Festival begins on Apr 29 at the Bury Art Gallery, just outside of Manchester. The festival features artworks produced by poets, in an effort to showcase a potential encounter between the use of language in poetic practice and the use of language in visual artistry. Critics have recurrently argued that poetry verges on retinal [...] by Christian Bök

The Text Festival (Part 1) April 19, 2011: Tony Trehy (the author of 50 Heads) is curating the Text Festival, an exhibition that opens at the Bury Art Gallery in Manchester (UK) on April 29, during the weekend of the Royal Wedding. Tony Trehy has managed this festival three times since 2005, doing so in order to stage an encounter between the culture of poetic practice and the culture [...] by Christian Bök

The Untimeliness of the Xenotext April 10, 2011: Rachel Zucker asks us to consider whether or not we might prefer our poems to be either timeless or timelier. Historically, avant-garde poets have often called into question any reliable standard of value for excellence, leaving the field open to a permissive, if not nihilistic, attitude, in which no poetry seems adequate to any time, be it [...] by Christian Bök

The Xenotext Works April 2, 2011: The Xenotext is my nine-year long attempt to create an example of “living poetry.” I have been striving to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I use a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called [...] by Christian Bök