At the close of every year, for over a decade, I have taken a moment to reflect upon the year’s publications. Like in previous years, my “most engaging books” list reflects what I found most fascinating / useful / generative in terms of form & content from the books I read in 2021.
Seek out these volumes; every one will reward the search (your local, independent, bookstore can help; an excellent choice as many continue to struggle under the pandemic). This is the cream of the crop for 2021, seriously:
2021 was, yet again, an incredibly difficult year filled with loss, cancellations, illness, tension and heartache — it’s been so long and so on-going. Like so many of us this year, our year was defined by the loss of loved ones and the struggle to find meaning during uncertainty.
In 2021 Falmouth’s Guillemot Press published LENS FLARE, a collaboration between Rhys Farrell and I; it remains an honour to have this full-colour book published by Guillemot. They consistently make sensitively-designed and thoughtful books, please do check them out & support their exceptional list.
As Banff Centre’s Director of Literary Arts, i developed a slate of digital residencies which were, yet again, defined by the CoVid-19 Pandemic. Literary Arts residencies — all of which were fully-scholarshipped relieving the artists involved of all costs and tuition — were offered entirely online over Zoom. The year’s residencies enabled international writers to work online with exceptional faculty: January’s Winter Writers Residency with Waubgeshig Rice and Emma Healey; March’s Spring WritersResidency with Jenna Butler and Angela Rawlings; April’s Writing Studio with Caroline Adderson, Karen Solie, and Shyam Selvadurai; June’s Banff International Literary Translation Centre with Rhonda Mullins, Jeff Diteman, and Anita Anand; July’s Literary JournalismResidency with Charlotte Gill, Carol Shaben, and Michael Harris; August’s Emerging WritersResidency with Katherena Vermette, Michelle Good, and Amber Dawn, and the Summer WritersResidency with Kaie Kellough and Jordan Abel; September’s Poetry, Politics, and Embodiment with Sachiko Murakami and Mercedes Eng, and November’s Late Fall WritersResidency with Farzana Doctor and Orlando White. Banff Centre continues to have a long road ahead, but we are slowly bringing people back to campus for 2022/23. I so look forward to greeting artists back on campus when it’s safe.
On December 10th I was named Banff’s 2022-2024 Poet Laureate, following in the footsteps of out-going Laurate Stephen Ross Smith; it’s such an honour to represent the town and the arts in this role. I can’t wait to lean into school visits, readings and workshops, and engaging the town in new forms of writing.
I served on several community juries and committees to help bring artists and projects together in the Bow Valley, Alberta and nationally and spoke, via Zoom, to students at the University of Calgary and Leeds Beckett University. I donated my childhood collection of over 3,900 comic books to the University of Calgary to help facilitate the ongoing study of comic books as a literary and artistic form.
In addition to inclusion in Nancy Perloff’s Concrete Poetry A 21st Century Anthology, I was published in 5 anthologies and 13 different online and print journals over the year; thank you to the editors of those spaces. Invisible Books invited me to edit Helen Hajnoczky’s exceptional book of poetry Frost & Pollen.
There were also 10 different small press editions of my work published in 2021: One Simple Symmetry & Nine Variations (Kingston: Puddles of Sky), a, A Novel (Chile: Pez Espirale), Spalling (New Westminster: pagefiftyone), fine and course aggregate #1, fine and course aggregate #2 and Dilated Aperture (all from California’s poems-for-all), Brevflodslette (Copenhagen: nonplusultra) and Another Piece of Reassuring Plastic, WV/WY (with Sal Nunkachov), and Dendrochronology (all from No Press). I continue to place free PDFs of all of my work online — help yourself. There are a number of very exciting small press editions cooking for 2022, including several projects with Portugal’s Paper View Books.
None of this would have been possible without my incredible partner, Kristen, and our amazing daughter Maddie. My parents and mother-in-law have also been a steady voice of support and love; thank you.
In so many ways I only excel because of the strength and support of my community of friends and colleagues, especially Gary Barwin, Greg and Lisa Betts, Christian Bok, Kit Dobson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Helen Hajnoczky, Aubrey Hanson, Nasser Hussain, rob mclennan, and so many others. Thank you.
Press Release – December 9, 2021 Banff’s New Poet Laureate
The Banff Poet Laureate Committee is pleased to announce that Derek Beaulieu is Banff’s new Poet Laureate. Beaulieu’s two-year term begins January 2022.
Beaulieu says, “Banff has a long history of writing and art and I am eager to work with the town to explore the poetic possibilities of our home and community. Banff’s previous laureates Steven Ross Smith and Amelie Patterson both have left huge legacies of artistic engagement and I thank them for all their creativity. I am so excited to share my enthusiasm for poetry with our town and guests. Banff’s streets and pathways, schools and centres, have always inspired imagination; I look forward to being part of that ongoing dialogue. I am honoured to be chosen as Banff’s newest Poet Laureate, thank you!”
Derek Beaulieu is the author or editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and literary criticism. His most recent volume of fiction, a, A Novel, was published by France’s Jean Boîte Editions, his most recent volume of poetry, Surface Tension, is forthcoming from Coach House Books in Fall of 2022. He has performed his work around the world and been published in translation in over a dozen languages. Derek is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students.
New! THE MINUTE REVIEW (a little magazine of poetry, prose, and reviews) #1, 2 and 3 are now available for order! $5ea. (incl. postage) — email derek@housepress.ca to order your copies today!
Rhys Farrell, with whom I wrote Lens Flare (Guillemot, 2021), has re-imagined our collaborations as monumental murals on the exterior walls of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (where I am Director of Literary Arts). While only fantasies, these images conceive of Banff Centre’s huge walls covered with our day-glo collaborations… enjoy!
14 Ways of Being Kinder to the Earth – a small PDF anthology of Concrete poetry, edited by Gregory Bettsand i, featuring poetry by Kevin Stebner, APpy Monks, Vasilios Billy Mavreas, bill bissett, Marianne Holm Hansen & Dani Spinosa, Sacha Archer, Kyle Flemmer, Kate Siklosi, Gary Barwin, Laura Kerr, Eli Horn & Donato Mancini, and Matthew James Weigel – is now available for download.
ICYMI: purchase a physical copy — or download a PDF — and link to all of the critical and creative responses to my 2017 book a, A Novel ( Jean Boîte Editions, 2017)
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.
derek beaulieu's blog 
