07.

Craig Venter (in 2010) has used automated chemistry to create a bespoke species of synthetic bacterium: Mycoplasma laboratorium (otherwise nicknamed “Synthia”) — a cell bred with an artificially manufactured genome, built from scratch by a computer. Venter has “watermarked” this genome by encoding into it a line from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” ⁷ Venter has thus preserved a line of modern, poetic text in the first cells of an embryonic ecosystem, and his experiments have informed my own ongoing project entitled The Xenotext, in which I have created an example of “living poetry” by engineering a deathless bacterium so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem— an epic text that might outlast us all.