NEW: Christian Bök, “The Xenotext”

Any style of life
is prim

The faery is rosy
of glow

The above lines are excerpted from the poem “The Xenotext.” What’s so special about it? Poet/scientist Christian Bök encoded the first stanza into a DNA strand and injected it into an extremophile bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans, which (after some tinkering on Bök’s part) produced a corresponding protein with the second stanza encoded. It’s part of the world’s first “living poem.” Talk about experimental poetry.

Yes, but what does it mean? We’ve taken a shot at decoding (ha) these stanzas on Rap Genius. You can see the results here.