Transgenic Poetry: Loss, Noise, and the Province of Parasites

Transgenic poetry, in which a verbal text is coded as DNA and placed within a life form, has both extended and called into question some of the most basic generic conventions of poetry. This essay uses theories of parasitic language to examine transgenic poetry's emphasis on noise and loss, focusing on two prominent texts engaged with human reshaping of the environment: Eduardo Kac's Genesis and Christian Bök's ongoing The Xenotext Experiment.