A ROCK STAR IN THE POETRY WORLD
If you know poetry like a lot of people know music, Christian Bök is the Jon Bon Jovi of the writer's’ world. His book Eunoia made The Times list of top 10 books and is the top selling book of poetry in Britain. Eunoia is made up of five chapters – each dedicated to a vowel – containing only words of that vowel. The work is playful, but reveals the extent to which the brain works under duress to bear creation. The result of such a project is nonetheless writing that exhibits many qualities of poetry; resembling the rhythm and complexity of music being played on only five strings: a, e, i, o, u. Christian now teaches creative writing and literary studies at Charles Darwin University and I asked him five (similar) questions that were asked in an interview with Jon Bon Jovi by Graham Wray:
After everything that you have already achieved, what is your biggest gig so far? I have performed at more than 600 venues in my career, but some of the biggest gigs include not only my performance of sound-poems at the Getty Centre in Los Angeles, but also my exhibition of artwork at the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing. I have even gotten to hang out for a while with Björk in Reykjavik.
Do you still get a buzz from fronting some of the world’s biggest conferences? I always get a buzz from meeting my fans on the road — and I think that lecturing at conferences always provides an opportunity to try out novel ideas upon my peers. I really enjoy “blowing their minds” with some lovely, poetic scheme that pushes the boundaries of language to its limit — cases of impossibility.
What is the worst reading that you have ever seen done to one of your poems? I always feel honoured when someone delivers a reading of my poems — and I appreciate musicians who go to the trouble to set my work to music. I cannot, offhand, recall any egregious rendition of my poetry — but I might note that I really love the rock-and-roll medley of Eunoia, performed by The Bidiniband.
Beer or wine? I am friends with all the drinkable, polymeric molecules. I prefer wine (especially blends of shiraz) — but if you are hanging out with me at the wine bars in Darwin, I usually ask for a bottle from Ministry of Clouds or The Dark Side of the Moon. I also love martinis made from gin, infused with green ants.
Robert Frost or Robert Gray? Robert Plant. As an adolescent in school, I might have had to read work by the other two Roberts, but I suspect that every kid from my era has probably found their way to poetry through the lyrics of a rock-song like A Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. I still find this poem by Plant to be weirdly cryptic.
Adelle Sefton-Rawson lectures and coordinates in the common units program at CDU and is the winner of the NT Literary Awards Essay
Image caption and credit: "Every day after breakfast at the Foreshore Café in Nightcliff, I cross the lawn and stand at the edge of the cliff that overlooks the ocean, taking a photograph of the view, framed so as to recall the colour studies of a painter like Mark Rothko." - Christian Bok
