Imagine working on a poem and being able to use only one vowel. Last Wednesday, poet Christian Bök entertained students at the University of Toronto at Mississauga (UTM) with a reading of poems from his sound poetry book Eunoia. What separates Eunoia from other poetry collections is that Bök wrote each poem using only a single vowel.

“I don’t write poetry with any concept of content,” said Bök. “When I began, I thought it would only take six months.”

In fact, Eunoia took Bök seven years to compose. He worked relentlessly on it for five to six days a week, four to five hours a day, and upon completion, found it very difficult to find publishers who were willing to pick it up.

In 1994, Bök was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for best poetic debut. Bök is the author of Crystallography and created two artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also created conceptual artwork, such as books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks, featured in the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City.

Bök titled his mono-vowel poetry collection Eunoia because “it was the shortest word in the English language that had all five vowels in it.” Bök also notes that “eunoia” means “beautiful thinking.”

Although Eunoia sounds like gibberish to the average reader, Bök maintains that it does hold some literary merit, with literary devices such as syntactic rhyme and parallel rhyme.

“It was an incredible epiphany when it actually made sense,” said Bök. “But it impaired my ability to write and now I’m recovering mentally.”

“For my next book, I’ve completely shifted gears,” said Bök. “People say that your second book has to be different from your last one, so my second one is going to be a long sound poem.”

Despite the slamming of doors heard in the hallway at the start of Bök’s performance, most students left the lecture satisfied.

“I thought it was insightful and witty,” said UTM student Chris O’Brien. “And at times shocking. Imagine someone opening a lecture with nonsense.”

Canadian author and Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith followed Bök on stage. Smith read his short story “Serotonin” from The Notebooks, an upcoming anthology featuring interviews and short stories by Canadian authors.

“Serotonin” takes place during a rave at 1:00 a.m., approximately one hour after his young characters have taken their pills.

“I’m usually criticized for attacking—for writing loser characters,” said Smith.

But recently Smith was nominated for the National Newspaper Award (NNA) for his column “Virtual Culture.” “I’m flattered and absolutely thrilled,” said Smith about the NNA.