A Companion to American Poetry, First Edition. Edited by Mary McAleer Balkun, Jeffrey Gray, and Paul Jaussen © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 27 Life as New Media: Bioart, Biopoetry, and the Xenotext Experiment Avery Slater University of Toronto “Once ‘information’ has passed into protein it cannot get out again.” – Francis Crick 1 In this article, I will explore the stakes of biopoetry, a contemporary poetic practice that re- engineers the DNA of living creatures in order to enlist these creatures as hosts for works of poetry. Biopoetry asks whether poetry—as information—might be hosted genetically or biologi- cally; in doing so, it asks us to consider life itself as a medium. In my consideration of biopoetry, I will take as an important example the long-term, lab-based poetic project of Canadian experi- mental poet Christian Bök, including its most recently appearing installment The Xenotext, Book 1 (2015). The Xenotext, Book 1 introduces the concepts of genetic engineering informing the crea- tion of Bök’s lab-poem-organism. Bök has been working on the larger project (the Xenotext Experiment) since the early 2000s, using supercomputers as well as external genomics labs to “encipher” a poem into living organisms. 2 Having achieved some success with implanting a poetic-genomic sequence into an E. coli bacterium, Bök’s next goal is to graft this poem-genome into the DNA of a radiation-resistant extremophile bacterium D. radiodurans. The challenge of implementation is to design this alien poem–genome sequence in such a way that the organism doesn’t reject it, continuing instead to host the sequence within its DNA and reproducing it across its life cycle. In addition to sections entitled “The March of the Nucleotides” and “The Virelay of Amino Acids,” Xenotext, Book 1 also includes an adaptation of Virgil’s didactic agricultural poem, the Georgics (Book 4), into fifty unrhymed sonnets. Bök’s strategies of adaptation hold several