Dreams by Langston Hughes

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes

Recording a Poem

Blog Task 2: Reoccuring Theme on Silliman's Blog

Link to Beat Poetry on Silliman's Blog:

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.ca/search/label/Beat%20Poetry

Beat poetry is a style of writing from the mid-1950s and 1960s; the style of writing was popular in Greenwich Village, New York, and San Francisco, California. This style is a free-form type of writing that promotes individualism and protests the loss of faith. It was a small group of bohemian authors and poets that created beat poetry and became known as the leaders of the Beat Generation. The Beat Generation was a group of American post-World War 2 writers that started in the 1950’s. The “Beat” culture consisted of rejection of received standards, innovations in style, experimentation with drugs, alternative sexualities, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and explicit portrayals of the human condition. Some of the best-known beat poets include Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. These writers were raised during the Great Depression in the United States and lived through World War 2. They where disappointed with their views of postwar culture of conformity and materialism, therefore causing Beat poetry to consist of the loss of personal values and faith, and promote the belief that modern life is spiritually empty.

Blog Task 2 : Christian BOK's Summary on his work with DNA, The Xenotext Works

Christian BOK’s Xenotext project is a nine-year long attempt to create “living poetry.” Christian has been trying to write a short verse about language and genetics, as a result of which he uses a “chemical alphabet” to translate his poem into a sequence of DNA in order to implant it into the genome of a bacterium, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans.

This microbe is capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile environments. Christian explains that when “chemical alphabet” is translated and implanted into a cell, it will be able to create a set of instructions, which will then create a viable benign protein. This protein, according to his original, chemical alphabet, is itself yet another text. What Christian BOK is trying to engineer is a life form that will be durable and capable of storing a poem, and also able to write poems even after human kind no longer exists.

Christian BOK has already received confirmation from the laboratory at the University of Calgary that his gene X-P13 has caused E.coli to fluoresce red in their test-runs. Therefore meaning that, when the “chemical alphabet” is implanted in the genome of the bacterium, it is able to write its own poems.Christian BOK is one step closer to creating a way to keep his work alive after human kind is gone.