Thank you so much to the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Arts for this wonderful honour…
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Billy Mills has posted a brief capsule review of my latest volume of criticism, The Unbearable Contact with Poets (Manchester: If P then Q, 2015) …
over on twiiter at @erasingwarhol i’ve just posted page TWO HUNDRED of my “a a novel” in which i erase warhol’s 1968 novel leaving a landscape of punctuation & street noise
I write on the writers who have crafted calgary’s imagination for CBC News
As Calgary’s poet laureate, I tried to serve as an artistic ambassador for the city — presenting at events and producing literary work that reflects our city and its citizens both locally and internationally.
In my position, I had one task in mind: to honour and recognize the city’s rich literary history: our journalists, our novelists, our poets and playwrights.
The role of the poet laureate is to be reflective of, and responsive to, community. To dialogue, teach, teach, learn and listen — to provoke, initiate, inspire … and to remember.
My lovely partner Kristen Beaulieu teaches Seniors Yoga at Calgary’s Scandivanvian Centre and has an incredibly eager and excited group of students . Upon hearing that i have traveled on numerous occasions as Poet Laureate to the Nordic countries, they were excited to hear more about what I had encountered in those literary communities.
Last night i shared an hour with members of Calgary’s Scandinavian community discussing the role of the Poet Laureate, my interactions with Scandinavian communities and fielding some amazing questions …
damian lopes’s afterwords literature has just published a new leaflet of mine in celebration of National Poetry Month and the Mayor’s Poetry Challenge …
Brock University’s English MA program has just featured my work in their promotional material …
New from NO PRESS:
“Dishwashing Event PART ONE: TIANJIN, CHINA”
by Sacha Archer
Produced in alimited edition of 40 copies, 20 of which are available for sale for $4.50 each
(please email derek@housepress.ca to order)
From the author’s note:
The poems in Dishwashing Event were written by my washing of dishes (by hand). Or, a speech recognition program has written the poems by translating/ transforming the noise of my washing of dishes into words recorded in to a document in Microsoft Word. Each poem records one day’s bout of washing. Post-event, I returned to the texts and cut them into a verse form to add room for breathing and greater coherence in the reading, but otherwise they are exactly how they were first produced by the speech recognition program. At the time, I was living in Tianjin, China, and there was no dishwasher (but the hands of my wife and I) in our apartment. The following poems are experiments of extraction and/or transformation. I set up the procedure. The dishes were cleaned. Poetry in the kitchen (not cooked up, but sparkling).
Sacha Archer was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1984. He earned his B.A. in English Literature in 2008 from Trent University. In his last year at Trent he won the 2008 P.K. Page Irwin Prize for his poetry. In 2010 he was chosen to participate in the Elise Partridge Mentor Program. His work has appeared in ditch poetry, Eunoia Review, 491 Magazine, filling Station and ACTA Victoriana.
Also now available from NO PRESS:
- lopes, damian. en vers un beau lieu: beaulieu inverse. Calgary: No press, March [i.e. April] 2016. 60 copies. $0.50 ea.
- Hunt, Ken. Antiverse Palindrome. Calgary: No press, March 2016. 50 copies. $0.50 ea.
- Clarke, George Eliott. The University of Timbuctu: Prospectus (1327). Calgary: No press, April 2016. 60 copies. $0.50 ea.
I discuss “The horror of being a novelist” in the nightmarish stairwell of Alberta College of Art + Design (click image for link): 
derek beaulieu's blog 