Christopher Bakka is a writer from Texas whose work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Nat. Brut, Asymptote, Two Hawks Quarterly, Prelude, and Assaracus, among other places. He has also translated works by Arthur Rimbaud and François Augiéras from the French. In 2018, he was named a Lambda Literary fellow and attended the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.
At Knox College in Illinois, he studied English literature and theatre; in 2011, he was awarded a Ford fellowship and attended the summer writing program at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado.
He has washed dishes, waited tables, sold fine art and furniture, and taught SAT and ACT prep to high school students. Now he works for a software company on a project in Alaska.
“The whole front of the glacier is gashed and sculptured into a maze of shallow caves and crevasses, and a bewildering variety of novel architectural forms, clusters of glittering lance-tipped spires, gables, and obelisks, bold outstanding bastions and plain mural cliffs, adorned along the top with fretted cornice and battlement, while every gorge and crevasse, groove and hollow, was filled with light, shimmering and throbbing in pale-blue tones of ineffable tenderness and beauty.”
—John Muir, Travels in Alaska
On February 12, 2024, I moved to Alaska. Here are some photos of my journey thus far.
“What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”
—Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods
On September 24, 2023, I hiked up Mt. Katahdin, the highest point in Maine. This picture was taken on the Knife Edge Trail, which leads from Baxter Peak to South Peak, Chimney Peak, and Pamola Peak.
“To each being, several other lives seemed due.”
—Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
In 2022, I published A Season in Hell and The Illuminations, with Selected Poems and Letters, a revised and expanded edition of my translations of visionary French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Elysian Hyperlapse
Here’s a time-lapse video of me in May of 2016 walking nearly 9 kilometers down the center of La Voie Royale in Paris—from La Grande Arche de la Défense, through the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, down the Champs-Élysées, across the Place de la Concorde, past the Luxor Obelisk, through the Tuileries, beneath the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, across the Place du Carrousel, inside and beyond the Louvre Pyramid, and finally behind the Louvre. Maxime Richard conceived of, shot, and edited this project.