Most 'experimental' poetry is facile. A shape is formed , indentation is nontraditional, syntax is warped, but rarely is something said which more traditional writing cannot convey. Worse yet, much of it is just a repetition of what was novel forty years ago. It is experimental in the way a high schooler titrating an acid is experimenting—they are learning something, certainly, but are following clear guides and teaching nothing new to any knowledgeable observer.

Bök is the rare exceptional experimentalist poet. Crystallography is his first book. His second book, Euonia, is a lipogram where every section contains only one type of vowel. It’s skilfully executed but hardly novel. The Xenotext is where things begin to get really out there: in it, he encodes a poem into DNA injected into a bacterium, which in turn produces a protein poem. One can read about his progress in The Xenotext: Book I. Finally, The Kazimir Effect is a book of visual poetry consisting primarily of white squares inspired by Suprematist Composition: White on White.

Here's a typical poem:

Textbooks teach

you that to lock

solutions in your
icebox overnight

can precipitate from

water, candy

on a cord, words
accreting meaning

so that the linecan end at lastin the sweetestof stalactites.Crystallization.