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.

For more information please contact:

Banff Poet Laureate, Derek Beaulieu: derek@housepress.ca
Chair of Banff Poet Laureate Committee, Kurt Bagnell: kurt22@shaw.ca

banffpoetlaureate.ca

Trinity college Dublin PhD researcher Amelia McConville studies what happens to your brain when you read poetry like mine …

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!

Ontario’s Chris Turnbull has included one of my concrete poems in her GROVE PROJECT whereby poems are placed in natural environments…

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 Betts and 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.

Have a look!

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)

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.

• François Bon unwraps a, A Novel in his “Service de presse, 38 | Virgules, musiques & autres zooms” video blog post (youtube, discussion starts at 15:00, in French)
• Paris’ Radio Nova interviews me in their studio
• (drowned out by traffic noise): a, A novel, a CD of sound responses to a, A Novel is available
• “Calgarian creates rhythm of New York through text” (Metro Calgary, Feb 1, 2016)
• Nancy Miller interviews me in the streets of Copenhagen about a, A Novel
• erasingwarhol; the twitter feed which documents the creation of each page in a, A Novel
• “Beaulieu brilliantly blows up Warhol”: Jonathan Ball reviews a, A Novel in The Winnipeg Free Press
• Kyle Flemmer reviews a, A Novel in Lemonhound 3.0
• Jana Gregorio reviews a, A Novel in Broken Pencil
• Christian Bök lists a, A Novel on his “The Five Most Intriguing Books of Poetry Read by Me in 2017” list
• Gary Barwin’s capsule review of a, A Novel
• Nathan Spoon reviews a, A Novel at X-Peri
• Maunis Sinanović reviews a, A Novel for Radio Student (Slovenian)
• Kamilla Löfström reviews a, A Novel in Standart (Danish)
• Ben Denzer’s portrait of a, A Novel at icecreambooks.com
• Arnold McBay animates the first few pages into a swarm of streetnoise
• Arnold McBay extends his project to the 1st 150 pages…
• “150 (for Andy)”, a poster by Arnold McBay and myself
• available as a downloadable PDF (and recirculating on issuu via GAMMM here)
• Gilda Williams’ afterword, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Men Women and Punctuation in Warhol’s Novel a‘‘
• limited edition prints, from Jean Boîte Editions, of 10 pages from of a, A Novel [sold out]
• a 20-page excerpt was published by Chile’s Pez Espirale as a limited edition chapbook
• my computer narrates a tale about a, A Novel, superimposed over the 1960’s New York skyline

ICYMI: download a PDF and link to all of the critical responses to my out-of-print 2007 book flatland: a romance of many dimensions (York, UK: information as material).

“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

• Gregory Betts’ review of Flatland (Lemonhound)
• Jesse Ferguson’s review of Flatland (Matrix)
• Chris Ewart’s review of Flatland and Local Colour (PDF) (Poetic Front)
• Sina Queyras discusses Flatland (Lemonhound)
• Christian Bok’s review of Flatland (Poetry Foundation Harriet Blog)
• Jakob Lien discusses Flatland (Sensorium) [in Swedish]
• Flatland (18 MB PDF) as available on UBU

CDN Warren manipulates 8 of my poems in APERTURE to create “VENT: 8 Abominations for Derek Beaulieu“, a series of remixed visual poems, each building on the original in surprising ways (thank you so much!)

Sal Nunchakov transforms a excerpt from my chapbook “Extispicium” into Waving at Derek, a trio of beautifully manipulated visual images in the latest issue of Anamorphoseis – check it out!