Arnold McBay has started printing visual poems by his peers on birch bark he has harvested himself – i’m honoured to have work in his early attempts alongside Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin and bpNichol …

CBC News Calgary interviews me about my favourite holiday read: Moby Dick …

I’m proud to have an excerpt from A A NOVEL (forthcoming form Jean Boite Editions) in UNLIMITED/IMPRINT #2: a PDF journal that asks to be shared, gleaned, edited, hacked & remixed. For more information, click

here for to be on the subscriber list

or here to download the most recent issue via dropbox

new from No PRESS:

passagenarbeit by Benjamin Groh

Produced in a limited edition of 50 copies, 20 of which are for sale.

$2.50ea.

to order , please email derek beaulieu at derek@housepress.ca

These visual poems degenerate a passage from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” They present hieroglyphs, streets driven through Benjamin’s words by the work of history, arcades to walk through without stopping, and citations in the book of creation

Proud to have Vexations Book 2 included in 21st-Century Visual Poetics, an exhibition in the English department at the University of Ottawa. Organized by the graduate students in Robert Stacey’s “Modern Poetry and The Visual” course, the students staged a day-long exhibition and Q&A session … and thank you to Michelle Hulan for interviewing me and discussing Vexations!

Duchamp’s neologistic formulation of the inframince (infrathin) is notoriously difficult to define; Duchamp himself depended on examples. The infrathin can be seen in the example of two forms cast from the same mould, differing in the most minute of ways. The difference between two chess pawns; the infrathin difference in the behaviour of the black and white pieces.

Duchamp infamously surrendered his art practice in the 1930s in favour of pursuing accreditation as a professional chess player believing that his career in the visual arts was at a standstill. His attraction to chess was an artistic one however, as he argued that

The chess pieces are the block alphabet that shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem …. I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

Taking inspiration from Duchamp’s poetic evocation of the visual design of the chessboard, I have rendered the openings of all of Duchamp’s chess games into a series of poetic glyphs. Each 8 by 8 grid represents the positioning of the black pieces following the initial gambits in each of Duchamp’s recorded chess games, recreating each opening as the fledgling moments of cellular automata in John Conway’s Game of Life.

I just ordered the books for my winter term ENGL1118 (creative writing – fiction) course at Mount Royal University: Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener, Lyn Hejinian’s My LIfe, Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a place in Paris, Jonathan Ball’s Ex Machina and Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths — gonna be a great course!

Thanks to the efforts of my colleagues Kit Dobson, Michelle Bodnar, Richard Harrison, Micheline Maylor, Natalie Meisner and Beth Everest, we staged another pop-up poetry typewriter event at Mount Royal University — it was great fun to share these machines with students, create poetry on demand and have some great conversations.    

2 sneak previews of my resetting of Stéphane Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Des” using 3Dpoetryeditor.

Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Des” (here in English translation by Robert Bononno and Jeff Clarke from the 2015 Wave books edition) is a foundational text  for the exploration of page design, typography & type size and the tension of varied directions in reading.

Using 3Dpoetryeditor, I have tossed Mallarme’s poem in to the tempest of stormy digital waves, the lines of the poem left to eddy and crash against each other, creating a whirling tension of recombinant text.

The final moving, dynamic, evolving piece will premiere at Poetry International in Rotterdam, June 2017.

3Dpoetryeditor (3DPE) was designed by Jon Staale Ritland, Jan Baeke, Michiel Koelink and David Jonas.

Thank you Mount Royal University’s SUMMIT magazine for including me in a discussion about the state of contemporary poetry…