bio-poetry

A succulent growing human hair in Howard Boland and Laura Cinti’s Cactus Project is an inquiry into primate/plant interrelations, indirectly following up on (by inverting) Whitman’s vision of a poet’s body as an overgrown swamp or canebrake. Bio-art can now perform horizontal gene transfers across species lines, and so Thoreau’s desire to be “the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing” can also be partially realized in experiments that test the boundaries between humans and their often unruly crops.

Feeding “deoxyribonucleic acid” into an anagram generator, one receives results like “a crucible decoy dioxin” and “a cubicle diced irony ox” and “a cubic code dioxin lyre” and “a bouncily dicier codex.” These lettristic recombinations fittingly suggest animals turned into conundrums on laboratory workbenches and harps made from humanly concocted chemicals playing geometric melodies and books sliced up into elusive components. This is tellingly ironic, as the science of genetics and the genre of bio-poetic art intersect most productively at the level of the malleable, protean letter.