Derek Beaulieu – författare

Quill pen, linotype, computer: does how you write affect what you write? In with wax, derek beaulieu spurns the sentence and woos the phrase, the image and the language of printing, weaving fragments together to address the question of how publishing and printing affect writing. The result is a series of poems -- marvellous hybrids of visual, Language and lyrical poetry -- that are sure to impress.

Typography meets poetry at a Pink Floyd laser-light showIn Surface Tension, poetry is liquefied. Flowing away from meaning, letters and words gather and pool into puddles of poetry; street signs and logos reflected in the oily sheen of polluted gutters of rainwater. Like a funhouse mirror reflecting the language that surrounds us, the pages drip over the margins, suggesting that Madge was right, we are “soaking in it!”Surface Tension updates visual poetry for our post-pandemic age, asking us rethink the verbiage around us, to imagine letters as images instead of text, to find meaning in their beautiful shapes as Beaulieu stretches, torques, slides, blurs, and melts them into Dali-esque collages."The striking compositions you’ll find in Surface Tension are being presented sequentially in book form, yet that they wouldn’t be out of place hanging on the wall goes without saying. Beaulieu swerves Gomringer when writing that 'Readibility is the key: like a logo, a poem should be instantly recognizable...' yet, to this reader, these works merit sustained and enthusiastic viewing precisely because they teeter on the edge of legibility. The kinetic, glitchy quality of their 'alphabetic strangeness' keeps them unrecognizable as poems and, here, 'that is poetry as I need it,' to quote Cage. Think of them as anti-advertisings selling you nothing but bountiful manifestations of the irreducible plasticity of numbers, punctuation marks, and letter forms. No logos." – Mónica de la Torre, Madelon Leventhal Rand Endowed Chair in Literature, Brooklyn College; co-editor of Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979"With his distinctive visual palindromes and angled axes of symmetry, Derek Beaulieu has developed a signature mastery of Letraset, leveraging the twentieth-century technology as a vehicle for bring concrete poetry into the twenty-first century. With Surface Tension, Beaulieu takes the possibilities of that new idiom even further, unsettling the fixity his symmetries once reinforced and dislodging the set in Letraset as poems distort in fun-house-mirror swerves, sag as if under their own weight, pool and smear in the liquid logic of heated ink, or swoop and blur as if in motion. In the process, these poems make visible the filmic potential of the photocopier, the facture of abraded transfers from brittling stock, and the three-dimensional substrate of the page with its flexible bends in curving space. These are thus poems in part about their own modes of production. They are beautiful products of a self-aware and intelligent process." – Craig Dworkin, author of Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality"'When most of the language we consume is non-poetic, should poetry not attempt to poetically intervene within these spaces that are not traditionally poetic?' The answer to Derek Beaulieu’s question, put forward in his beautiful essay, is surely yes: the ten brilliantly adventurous visual poems in his Surface Tension make a startling case for his fascinating Letraset/photocopier inventions. Beaulieu’s compositions originate in a place of clean design and logical narrative; soon, as in a dream, they open up, ushering in what he calls 'a poetry of difference, chance, eruption.' Marcel Duchamp would have called it the poetry of the infrathin: watch 'Simple Symmetry' or 'Dendrochronology' open up and come alive in their minutely evolving new spaces. This is quite simply an enchanting book – a book producing new pleasures with each turn of the page." – Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, Stanford University

CBC BOOKS "CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2024"For bpNichol’s 80th birthday, a selection of 80 pieces from his 1980s notebooks, an astounding trove of never-before-seen work.One of Canada’s most beloved poets, bpNichol (1944–1988), left a huge legacy of poetry, prose, scripts, comics, and playful interrogation of language after his untimely passing in 1988. In celebration of what would have been Nichol’s eightieth birthday, Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from Nichol’s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer’s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits of writing.Lovingly edited by noted poet-scholars Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts, who provide an afterword contextualizing Nichol’s practice, Some Lines of Poetry is a map of hidden corners, a guidebook to poetic play, and a tribute to Nichol’s ongoing influence."No other writer of our time and place was so diverse, attempted so much, and never lost sight of his intent." – Michael Ondaatje

In Writing Surfaces, derek beaulieu and Lori Emerson present a collection of John Riddell's work. Riddell's poems and short stories are a remarkable mix of largely typewriter-based concrete poetry mixed with fiction and drawings. Riddell's oeuvre fell out of popular attention, but it has recently garnered interest among poets and critics engaged with media studies (especially studies of the typewriter) and experimental writing. Riddell is best known for his short fiction pieces ""H"" and ""Pope Leo: El Elope,"" a pair of graphic fictions written in collaboration with, or dedicated to, bpNichol. However, his work moves well beyond comic strips into a series of radical fictions. Riddell's work embraces game play, unreadability and illegibility, procedural work, non-representational narrative, photocopy degeneration, collage, handwritten texts, and gestural work. His self-aware and meta-textual short fiction challenges the limits of machine-based composition and his reception as a media-based poet. With media studies increasingly turning to ""media archaeology"" and the reading and study of antiquated, analogue-based modes of composition (as typified by the photocopier and the fax machine as well as the typewriter), Riddell is a perfect candidate for further appreciation and study by new generations of readers, authors, and scholars.

Since the beginning of his poetic career in the 1990s, derek beaulieu has created works that have challenged readers to understand in new ways the possibilities of poetry. With nine books currently to his credit, and many works appearing in chapbooks, broadsides, and magazines, beaulieu continues to push experimental poetry, both in Canada and internationally, in new directions. Please, No More Poetry is the first selected works of derek beaulieu. As the publisher of first housepress and, more recently, No Press, beaulieu has continually highlighted the possibilities for experimental work in a variety of writing communities. His own work can be classified as visual poetry, as concrete poetry, as conceptual work, and beyond. His work is not to be read in any traditional sense, as it challenges the very idea of reading; rather, it may be understood as a practice that forces readers to reconsider what they think they know. As beaulieu continues to push himself in new directions, readers will appreciate the work that he has created to date, much of which has become unavailable in Canada. With an introduction by Kit Dobson and an interview with derek beaulieu by Lori Emerson as an afterword, Please, No More Poetry offers readers an opportunity to gain access to a complex experimental poetic practice through thirty-five selected representative works.

A radically liberating collection of essays, ideas and approaches to writing and teaching poetryDo It Wrong is a short, snappy series of provocations and suggestions designed to help poets think outside the box and foster creativity.It’s a permission slip to take a path others reject, to do the counter-intuitive thing, to embrace the weird.It's a guidebook designed to bring poets together, to question our assumptions, and to move past the “business as usual” educational models into the new, the strange, and the “wrong.”And it's a playful, purposeful contribution toward the building of stronger, more resilient writing communities.For readers of Beth Pickens’s Make Your Art No Matter What and Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, Derek Beaulieu distills 20 years of experience teaching creative writing into a joyfully mischievous manifesto on how to write and teach poetry with meaning.

Nights on Prose Mountain gathers all of beloved writer bpNichol's published fiction. Originally appearing between 1968 and 1983, and representing almost the entire arc of Nichol’s writing career, Nights on Prose Mountain is by turns heartbreaking, playful, and evocative. While Nichol’s poetry is widely studied, researched and taught, his novels have remained out of print and are overdue for a new edition. Nichol’s curiosity and craft, his exploration and exuberance, his lyricism and adventurousness are all on exhibit here. From the Governor General's Award–winning “The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid” through more obscure treasures like Extreme Positions, and including Still, For Jesus Lunatick, and Andy, Nights on Prose Mountain traces Nichol’s life in fiction.