Gary Barwin has just posted an essay on my “Prose of the Trans-Canada” on Jacket2: “derek beaulieu’s Prose of the Trans-Canada is an epic inscribed scroll, a graphemic saga as Odyssean and graphic a roadtrip as traveling the eponymous Trans-Canada highway.“
Archives for category: concrete / visual poetry
On Friday April 12, 2013 at 7:00pm at Calgary’s Pages Books (1135 Kensington Rd NW) we will be celebrating the launch of Please, No more poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu and Writing Surafces: selected fiction of john riddell (both from Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013). Local writers Christian Bök, Richard Harrison, Natalie Simpson, Kathleen Brown, Karis Shearer and others will read /respond to / perform beaulieu’s works and good times will be had. Hosted by Kit Dobson, the editor of Please, No More Poetry.
More about Please, No more poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu:
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.
More about Writing Surfaces: Selected Fiction of John Riddell:
John Riddell is best known for “H” and “Pope Leo, El ELoPE,” a pair of graphic fictions written in collaboration with, or dedicated to, bpNichol, but his work moves well beyond comic strips into a series of radical fictions. In Writing Surfaces, derek beaulieu and Lori Emerson present “Pope Leo, El ELoPE” and many other works in a collection that showcases Riddell’s remarkable mix of largely typewriter-based concrete poetry mixed with fiction and drawings.
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.
Riddell’s oeuvre fell out of popular attention, but it has recently garnered interest among poets and critics engaged in media studies (especially studies of the typewriter) and experimental writing. As media studies increasingly turns to “media archaeology” and the reading and study of antiquated, analogue-based modes of composition (typified by the photocopier and the fax machine as well as the typewriter), Riddell is a perfect candidate for renewed appreciation and study by new generations of readers, authors, and scholars.
Please, no more poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu
Edited by Kit Dobson.
Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.
available for order here or form your local independent bookstore.
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.
New Orleans’ József Makkos is publishing a new small press edition of excerpts from my conceptual novel Flatland.
The edition will be a tactile treat and will feature letterpress covers printed on 50-year-old laid Strathmore bond (a type of which hasn’t been made for 20 years), off-white felt finis flyleaves and interior pages on english bond …
a few preview photos of the prototype for this forthcoming edition:
Xexoxial editions has just published a selection of my visual poetry entitled Kern as the latest issue of Xerolage Magazine …. check it out!
Lori Emerson and I are proud to have edited Writing Surfaces: Selected Fiction of John Riddell through Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Copies are now available to order through your local independent bookstore.
No Press is proud to announce the release of three new publications:
“Exercizes (Louis-Ferdinand Céline)” by Ola Ståhl — a trio of typewriter-based visual translations of Céline; published in a limited edition of 60 copies (only 28 of which are for sale). Each copy if handsewn into hand-typed, found paper covers.
“Uncreative Manifesto (2005)” by Nyein Way — a manifesto of conceptual writing from Myanmar and the basis for Way’s investigation of the international potential of conceptual writing. Produced in a limited edition of 80 copies (of which only 38 are for sale).
“Manifesto of Yellowism” by Marcin Lodyga and Vladimir Umanets. The key document in the emergence of “Yellowism“, the internationally notorious “autonomous phenomenon in contemporary culture.” Produced in a limited edition of 80 copies (of which only 38 are for sale).
All three of these limited edition items are now available for $6 total (including postage); please email derek@housepress.ca to order copies.
The publication of bill bissett’s Rush: what fuckan theory; a study uv language in 1972 firmly ushered Canadian poetics into the postmodern era. Out of print for 40 years – and reissued here complete with an interview with bissett about the book’s creation and a critical afterword by derek beaulieu and Gregory Betts – Rush embodies a collagist, multi-conscious approach to art that recognizes no division between the work and the world, the author and his sexuality, his breath, his influences; the theory and the practice. Arguing that “a new line has started,” Rush captures the urgency of a new model of production that resists the closure and mastery of any one mind. It is an elegant rejection of aesthetic ego and all presumptions of authority. Rush: what fuckan theory; a study uv language is a vital, vocal protest against business as usual and the exploitation of the individual from one of Canada’s most important avant-garde poets.
