Silence: Lectures and Writings

be28a7_f7c21661aec443a388188e14b8e5df22mv2-1Malmo, Sweden: Timglaset Editions, 2023

available for order here

In 1961 John Cage published his seminal book of essays, SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS. In that collection of essays, Cage expounds his theoretical framework and compositional style, and builds upon 4′33″. 4′33″—frequently disparaged as a farce played upon a devoted audience—is a composition which, focusses the musical potential of the ambient sounds of performance halls and shuffling audiences. While the audience is visually captivated by the (non)movements of the pianist, the auditory experience—the performance itself—takes place with the creaking of chairs, the clicking of HVAC systems, the coughing and jittering of uncomfortable audience members; 4′33″ is as much about the structures of performativity as it is about critical and close listening; the allowing of small ambient noises to be considered with as much import as musical notes on an orchestral score.

With his edition of SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS, Derek Beaulieu has created a visual response to Cage’s SILENCE, or more accurately, to a poorly-scanned PDF version found online found on monoskop.org (which coincidently also hosts a PDF edition of his a, A Novel). On each page Beaulieu has deleted all the text except the punctuation marks—which visually represents breath, pauses and breaks—and the grime and digital “noise” on the poorly-scanned page, the creaking digital performance space, of Cage’s lectures.

SILENCE is published in a limited edition which mimics the size and shape of Cage’s Wesleyan UP edition, with the addition of a critical, explanatory afterword by noted scholar Peter Jaeger, grounding the edition in ambient sound, erasure, Buddhism, and conceptual writing.

Digitally printed in an edition of 200 copies, 304 pages, size 170×200 mm, with a full colour matte laminated cover.

****

Surface Tension

9781552454503_cover_rb_fullcover Toronto: Coach House Books, 2022.

available for order here.

In Surface Tension, poetry is liquified. 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!”

“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’re 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

“With his distinctive visual palindromes and angled axes of symmetry, Derek Beaulieu has developed a signature mastery of Letraset, leveraging the 20th-century technology as a vehicle for bring concrete poetry into the 21st 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

“Not words, letters; not letters, shapes; not shapes, figures; not figures, ciphers; not ciphers, ornaments; not ornaments, decoration; not decoration, semiotics; not semiotics, communicative possibilities; not vagrant potential, slowly forming inflection; not melting deflection, language as dance: in, out, upside down, flapping, flipping, all ways round.” —Charles Bernstein

“When most of the language we consume is non-poetic, should poetry not attempt to poetically intervene within these non-traditionally poetic spaces?” 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

****

Lens Flare
co-written with Rhys Farrell

coverforwebsite_page_1

Falmouth, UK: Guillemot Press, 2021.

available for order here.

Lens Flare is a collaboration between Derek Beaulieu and Rhys Farrell, based on the visual poetry published in Beaulieu’s Aperture sequence. Beaulieu’s concrete poems engage with dead media (dry-transfer lettering) to create disintegrating logos and letterforms, a crumbling vocabulary of suggestion and memory, and Farrell amplifies these images by adding walls of dynamic colour, pop-coloured panels of dynamism that suggest urban murals, playful geometrics and a day-glo lettristic discotheque.

“Lens Flare by Derek Beaulieu and Rhys Farrell is a kaleidoscope of colour: letterforms disintegrating in graphic landscapes of pink, blue, yellow and black. We’ve entered poetry’s future space.” — Chris McCabe, The Bookseller

*****

Aperture

dzw6jwhxcaehvexShropshire, UK: Pentaract Press, 2019.

Out of print.

Concrete poetry made from crumbling dry transfer lettering, digitally recoloured into day-glo arrangements deigned to make your eyeballs bleed.

“It would be easy to say that Aperture ‘looks into language’, but make no mistake: it’s not a dry academic investigation, or an open-ended inquiry – it quite literally peers into the material of language. Stein might have extracted the ‘radium of the word’, but Beaulieu retains the carapace left behind, and in doing so, finds fresh value in every blister and fissure. Language becomes like your oldest t-shirt, poised on the brink of absolute familiarity and complete disintegration. Or, more succinctly: Écriture craquelure.”— Nasser Hussain

“Imagine Rothko with Letraset, Rorschach as a synaesthesiac suprematists, or the aurora borealis viewed from Willie Wonka’s great glass elevator, and you’re some way towards the beautifully delirious polychromatic drench that is derek beaulieu’s Aperture. Operating at the ragged perimeter of language, beaulieu sends back glyphs, graphemes and glitches, strange news from other stars. Aperture is apt: each page is an opening into a dimension at once contingent and perfectly ordered, fragmented yet geometric, abstract yet coherent. Aperture is not so much a book as an experience, an irresistible technicolor ride.”— Tom Jenks

*****

Counter / Weight

Achill Island, Ireland: red fox press, 2018.

available for order here.

Counter/Weight is a hardcover, handmade edition of Letraset-based visual poems; every piece exploring fractured letterforms, symmetry and visuality in text.

*****

a, A Novel

Paris, France: Jean Boîte Editions, 2017.

available for order here.

Derek Beaulieu’s a, A Novel is an erasure-based translative response to Andy Warhol’s eponymous novel. Beaulieu carefully erases all of the text on each page of the original work, leaving only the punctuation marks, typists’ insertions and onomatopoeic words. The resultant text is a novelistic ballet mécanique, a visual orchestration of the traffic signals and street noise of 1960’s New York City. This visually powerful half score/half novel highlights the musicality of non-narrative sounds embedded within conversation.

Published in December 1968, Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel consists solely of the transcribed conversations of Factory denizen Ondine (Robert Olivo). Ondine’s amphetamine-addled conversations were captured on audiotape as he haunted the Factory, hailed cabs to late-night parties and traded gossip with Warhol and his coterie. The tapes were roughly transcribed by a small group of high school students. Rife with typographic errors, censored sections, and a chorus of voices, the 451 pages of transcription became, unedited, “a new kind of pop artefact”. These pages emphasize transcription over narration, hazard over composition.

In his book, Derek Beaulieu offers a radical displacement of Andy Warhol’s work. He erases the novel’s speaking characters – members of the mid 1960’s New York avant-garde – and preserves only the musicality of their conversations. Beaulieu perfectly provides a tangible example of Theodor Adorno’s theory elaborated in his essay Punctuation Marks, in which he argues that punctuation marks are the “traffic signals” of literature and that there is “no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks”.

This visual poetry is accompanied by an essay by Gilda Williams, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do. Men, Women, and Punctuation in Warhol’s Novel a”. Her deep knowledge of both Andy Warhol’s work and the history of contemporary art explores the complicated history of the original novel and highlights the urgent and precise spirit of Derek Beaulieu’s work—the work of an artist who situates Uncreative Writing at the core of contemporary literature and artistic labour.

*****

Konzeptuelle Arbeiten

Bern, Switzerland: edition taberna kritika, 2017.

available for order here.

Derek Beaulieu ist einer der aktivsten Repräsentanten der internationalen, konzeptuellen Literatur. Dieser Band zeigt eine Auswahl seiner bekanntesten Arbeiten.

*****

Ascender / Descender

dada-beaulieu2.0Achill Island, Ireland: red fox press, 2016.

available for order here.

Ascender/Descender is one of a collection of small hand made artists’ books dedicated to experimental, concrete and visual poetry, or any work combining text and visual arts in the spirit of dada or fluxus.

*****

The Unbearable Contact with Poets
page1Manchester: if p then q press, 2015.

available for order here.

The Unbearable Contact with Poets, derek beaulieu’s second selection of essays and reviews, is essential reading. A keen and shrewd essayist, he marks himself out as one of the key commentators on contemporary concrete and conceptual poetry. The selection includes a substantial review of concrete poetry by women, an exploration into concrete and conceptual poetic representations of the holocaust, alongside interviews with Tony Trehy, Natalie Simpson and Gregory Betts, as well as lots more.

*****

Kern

f6jxeewbiaapexd

Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2014 / Goleta: Punctum Books, 2023

available for order here

Proposed as a collection of imaginary logos for the corporate sponsors of Borges’ Library of Babel, Kern balances on a precipice between the visual and nonsensical, offering poems just out of meaning’s reach. Using dry-transfer lettering, derek beaulieu made these concrete pieces by hand, building the images gesturally in response to shapes and patterns in the letters themselves. This is poetry closer to architecture and design than confession, in which letters are released from their usual semantic duties as they slide into unexpected affinities and new patterns. Kern highlights the gaps inside what we see and what we know, filling the familiar with the singular and the just seen with the faintly remembered.

“The detritus of signage is all around us. The poems in Derek Beaulieu’s riveting new collection begin by resembling the signs, logos & slogans of everyday life—and then become more & more unreadable. No two of these constellations are alike; each promises something it cannot quite fulfill, as readability, having failed, gives way to lookability. So suggestive are these images that we cannot stop looking, trying to decipher, to arrest the flow. Kern presents moments of poetic nostalgia for the signposts of a past that never fully existed.”—Marjorie Perloff

“Kern tweaks the white space of the page, arranging language while unsettling letters. Machines made not of words, but characters, these poems crank and churn, antiquated material rattling to life beneath Beaulieu’s beau frottage. The eye scans the boggled mass, seeing patterns within the patter as words stutter and boil while D.B. minds our b’s and q’s, p’s and d’s.”—Amaranth Borsuk

“Do letters have lives? We have to wonder, seduced as we are by the antics of these characters. The tradition of taking alphabetic forms & making them into suggestive glyphs has a complex history in the signs of masons, brands, trademarks, monograms & graphical poetics. In Beaulieu’s Kern the principle of enjambment is put to poetic purpose. Kern is a living demonstration that poetry is about unleashing the potential of combinatoric protocols to drive the performative art of letters on a page.”—Johanna Drucker

*****

Please, no more poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu
dobson-beaulieuEdited by Kit Dobson.

Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.

available for order here.

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.

“An engaging cross-section that offers beaulieu’s longtime readers a chance to revisit and rethink his practice while offering new readers an opportunity to explore a variety of innovative linguistic tactics…. By re-orienting beaulieu’s politics … Please, No More Poetry becomes a more engaging book than a simple celebration of an author’s work and accomplishments. It becomes a vital and engaging crossroads where … seemingly opposing sociopolitical fronts can meet and battle it out…. A crucial collection that not only looks back on a brilliant career, but looks toward the future of the medium itself, offering a sampling of innovative writing strategies and seeking a place for poets that is relevant, valuable, and meaningful in the contemporary world.”

— Eric Schmaltz, Lemon Hound

“A solid cross-section that serves as a strong introduction to the poet’s writings, as well as to concrete poetry generally (given the density of beaulieu’s work), the volume will handsomely reward readers seeking to broaden their conceptions of what poetry could be.”

— Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

*****

LCLocal Colour: Ghosts, Variations
Malmo, Sweden: PS Malmo / In Edit Mode Press, 2012.

Out of Print.

Local Colour; ghosts, variations takes as its point of departure, Paul Auster’s novella Ghosts, and, in particular, Derek Beaulieu’s reworking of Auster’s text, Local Colour, in which the entirety of Auster’s text has been removed, leaving only the chromatic words spread across the otherwise blank pages as coloured rectangles. Local Colour; Ghosts, variations picks up on the way in which Beaulieu’s piece seems to split Auster’s narrative text open by rendering it purely graphical, freeing it up, by the same gesture, to an excess and a bifurcation of meaning. Seeking to extend and amplify this ambition, the collection invites other writers, poets, musicians, and artists to implement procedures and process that allow them to do Beaulieu what Beaulieu did to Auster; that is, to split his colour rectangles open and see can be done with what is revealed. Contributors include Derek Beaulieu, Steve Giasson, Cia Rinne, Peder Alexis Olsson, Jörgen Gassilewski, Craig Dworkin, Elisabeth Tonnard, Martin Glaz Serup, Eric Zboya, Ola Ståhl, Pär Thörn, Carl Lindh, Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, Ola Lindefelt, Andreas Kurtsson, Helen White, Gary Barwin, Magda Tyzlik-Carver and Andy Prior.

*****

xerolage_52_front_coverKern
West Lima: Xexoxial, 2011.

available for order here.

A limited edition overview of beaulieu’s visual poetry, each piece a fragile arrangement of type on vacation.

*****

Seen of the Crime
Montreal: Snare, 2011.

Out of Print.

In a series of statements, essays, missives, and informal discussions, seen of the crime surveys the radical edges of Canadian and international poetry; the conceptual and the concrete, the political and the playful. With seen of the crime, derek beaulieu explores the flourishing and frustrating alternatives: poetry without subjectivity, without narrative, without words, and even without letters.

‘Finally, a book about poetry that is actually about poetry. derek beaulieu is quickly proving himself an essential companion to the contemporary.’
— Sina Queyras

  • Helen Hajnoczky’s review of seen of the crime
  • rob mclennan’s review of seen of the crime
  • Jeroen Nieuwland’s review of seen of the crime
  • Craig Dworkin’s review of seen of the crime (Third Factory / notes to poetry)
  • Jonathan Ball’s review of seen of the crime (Winnipeg Free Press)
  • available as a downloadable PDF (UBUWeb)

*****

201114_L-91x300Prose of the Trans-Canada

Toronto: book*hug, 2011.

available for order here.

In 1913 Blaise Cendrars created his monumental “Prose of the Trans-Siberian”, a milestone in the history of artists books and visual poetry. When the intended edition of 150 copies was laid end-to-end they measured the same length as the height of the symbol of Parisian Modernity, the Eiffel Tower.

derek beaulieu’s prodigious Prose of the Trans-Canada responds to Cendrars’ legacy in a 16″ x 52″ visual poem. When all 150 copies of this limited edition are placed end-to-end, the resultant length is the same as the symbol of Calgarian Modernity, the Calgary Tower.

A towering moment in beaulieu’s on-going exploration of letraset as a medium for concrete poetry, Prose of the Trans-Canada, issued as Moments Cafe No. 8, is published in a strictly limited edition of 150 copies.

  • Gary Barwin discusses Prose of the Trans-Canada at Jacket2
  • Prose of the Trans-Canada appears on the cover of Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics (edited by Bart Vautour, Erin Wunker, Travis V. Mason, Christl Verduyn)
  • Prose of the Trans-Canada appears in Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries (edited by Gregory Betts and Christian Bök)
  • Prose of the Trans-Canada is discussed in Cynthia Sugars’ The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature
  • Geof Huth reviews Prose of the Trans-Canada on his dbqp: visualizing poetics blog
  • Prose of the Trans-Canada was projected on the side of the Calgary Tower in 2014 in celebration of beaulieu’s being named Calgary’s 2014-16 Poet Laureate
  • Arn McBay’s digital translation (2016)

*****

How to Write

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2010.

available for order here.

How to Write is a perverse Coles Notes: a paradigm of prosody where writing as sampling, borrowing, cutting-and-pasting and mash-up meets literature. This collection of conceptual short fiction takes inspiration from Lautréamont’s decree that “plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.”

*****

Silence

Achill Island, Ireland: red fox press, 2010.

available for order here.

Silence is one of a collection of small hand made artists’ books dedicated to experimental, concrete and visual poetry, or any work combining text and visual arts in the spirit of dada or fluxus.

*****

Local Colour

Helsinki, Finland: ntamo, 2008.

Out of print.

Local Colour is a page–by–page interpretation of Paul Auster’s 72–page novella Ghosts. With Local Colour, beaulieu has removed the entirety of Auster’s text, leaving only chromatic words—proper nouns or not—spread across the page as dollops of paint on a palette. What remains is the written equivalent of ambient music—words which are meant to be seen but not read. The colours, through repetition, build a suspense and crescendo which is loosened from traditional narrative into a more pointillist construction.

*****

chains

Kingston, PA: paper kite press, 2008.

Out of Print.

With chains, derek beaulieu once again turns his attention to how “language regards itself, stalks itself, begins, slowly, to eat itself” (Canadian Literature) in a series of graceful abstractions made entirely from antiquated dry-transfer lettering. In chains, letters gather in elegant arrangements, architectural constructions and sinews of meaning.

*****

flatland: a romance of many dimensions

York, UK: information as material, 2007.

Out of print.

“As the Greenbergian modernists proclaimed the flatness of the canvas, so derek beaulieu reduces the page to a flat plane. The result is a new kind of flatness-call it non-illusionistic literature — a depthless fiction, one where image and narrative is reduced to line and shadow. In the great tradition of Picabia, beaulieu creates a perfect work of mechanical writing with one foot in the concrete poetic past and another in the flat screen future.”— Kenneth Goldsmith

*****

fractal economies

Vancouver: talonbooks, 2006.

available for order here

Represent[s] truly the best of beaulieu’s poetic practice.
— Prairie Fire Review of Books

*****

frogments from the frag pool: haiku after basho
co-written with Gary Barwin

Toronto: Mercury Press, 2005.

Out of Print.

“Delightful surprises lurk within these pages as Gary Barwin and derek beaulieu examine the old pond, the frog, the splash, and the mind of Basho. From the microscopic “old pond / universes rise & fall / a single splash” to the anthropomorphic “pond holding / its breath…” to the subjective “mind ponding” to the conceptual “splash as a hole in silence” — it’s all here. This book is a grand addition to the reverberation of Basho’s splash”— Nelson Ball

*****

with wax

Toronto:  Coach House Books, 2003.

available for order here

“derek beaulieu’s with wax is language stuffed with its own stuff. History is still hot with ink and determined to track, map and print wherever it can stamp its boots. It understands its own fibres and surfaces, leaves its mark both on the page and in the grooves of its own moveable type. Watch your floors and walls, these words leak everywhere.”— Larissa Lai

  • Jocelyn Grosse’s review of with wax (FFWD)
  • Meredith Quartermain’s review of with wax (Canadian Literature)
  • Jason Christie’s review of with wax (filling Station)
  • Tim Conley’s review of with wax (Queen Street Quarterly)