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…

My newest chapbook Vexations 2: Xerox workstation 5755 is now out from Puddles of Sky Press; thank you Michael Casteels for publishing this small edition! (click to order a copy)

My colleague Pratim Sengupta (research chair of STEM Education at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School) has just posted the first of his “De-Coding Public: Conversations with Derek Beaulieu”, on “public”, “code”, “text” and “experience”.

The second of a projected 10 volumes, VEXATIONS decomposes the score of Erik Satie’s masterpiece through repeated photocopy degeneration. Beaulieu’s VEXATIONS moves writing towards “furniture music.”

Each volume uses a different photocopier to degenerate Satie’s score – with startlingly unique results. Taken as a 10-book suite, the completed project will present 840 variations (84 variations per book over 10 books)

Purchase a copy here (limited edition of 26 copies; 176 pages $26 + shipping)

Download a free PDF here

Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif,

il sera bon de se préparer au préalable,

et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses

—Erik Satie

(“In order to play the theme 840 times in succession,

it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand,

and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities”)

—Erik Satie