Sometimes, when playing Scrabble, I find myself facing a tray full of vowels, consider myself unlucky, and carefully add one or maybe even two of them onto a previously placed consonant on the board, making a word like 'eye' or 'ewe' or 'tea' or 'tee,' for minimal points, and reach into the bag of letters with closed eyes hoping for anything other than an a, e, i, o, or u.

From now on when I find myself in that situation I'll think of Christian Bok (I don't know how to place the dots over the o) and wonder what he would do in a similar situation. Maybe he'd find an N on the board and make a word like 'eunoia,' the title of the book that is his wild and daring love affair with vowels.

Hearing Bok read from Eunoia (which, as it happens, is the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels) at last night's mainstage poetry bash was an experience to say the least. An experience all together different from reading the work on one's own.

In fact, I was so into the reading that I didn't even think about the cheese on the table near the bar! Imagine that.

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See Christian Bok today (Thursday) at 1:00pm in room 3M69 at the University of Winnipeg.

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Brandon James Bertram is an English/Creative Writing student at the University of Winnipeg. He reads, writes, rides bikes, and drinks coffee.