In support of WORDSWORTH 2014 SUMMER LITERARY CAMP I recently completed a Concrete poem on the windows of Calgary’s LOFT 112.
Written over 6 hours, this untitled piece was constructed organically, without a plan.
Responsive to the shapes of letters, and movement outside the window, this poem will remain permanently on the window of LOFT 112 as a reminder of the fundraising efforts.
This afternoon, LOFT112 hosted Typing Pool #2 – a chance for members of Calgary’s literary community to try their hand on a series of typewriters; clanging keys and sliding carriages. This initiative is linked to my ENGL214 course at Alberta College of Art + Design…
![photo[1]](https://derekbeaulieu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/photo1.jpg)
For news and updates on my teaching at Alberta College of Art + Design, check out www.creativetypewriting.wordpress.com…
On SUNDAY MARCH 9 from 1:00-3:00pm, join LOFT 112 for an afternoon of typing and exploration!
As part of derek beaulieu’s ENGL214 class at ACAD, he has gathered antique typewriters from all over the city. Students have been exploring the poetic possibilities of outdated technology in poetry and prose, text art and assignments.
On MARCH 9th, a number of those strange old devices will be available for you to use!
By using dead technology we are in fact learning how we interface with the tools we have now. Step back from your dependance on technology and revel int he tactile experience of typing. The sounds, the smells and the poetic possibilities of recharging your writing by returning to the fun of ink on paper.
6-8 typewriters (manual and electric) in working order will be set up at LOFT 112 for writers to use from 1-3pm.
LOFT 112 is located at #112, 535 8 Ave SE Calgary, Alberta… see you there!
No Press is proud to announce the publication of
Top Secret Calligraphy by Ken Hunt
Published in a hand-bound edition of 50 copies (only 25 of which are for sale), Documentary Poetry is available for $5 including domestic postage (+ $2 non-Canadian postage). To order please email derek beaulieu.
These asemic, visual poems invent a form of calligraphy out of the strike-throughs used to cross out the word “CONFIDENTIAL” from the pages of NASA’s voice transcription document of the Apollo 11 moon mission. This calligraphy exemplifies the creation of a new text through the re-censorship of a declassified transcript.
The author becomes the new censor of the text, obliterating all trace of the word that the strike-throughs attempt to obscure and negate. This erasure frees the strike-throughs from their original context, and accentuates their abstract forms. The lines become a lost language, ushering explorers of textual space through the vacuum of meaning.
Ken Hunt’s work appears in Sphere Literary Magazine: International Journal of Student Writing; in The Gauntlet, the University of Calgary’s student newspaper; and in various chapbooks. For three years, Ken served as editor of NōD Magazine, the University of Calgary English department’s publication of undergraduate prose, poetry, and visual art. In 2010, Ken co-founded The Scribe and Muse, a University of Calgary club that promotes writing and literacy, offering a free peer-editing service to students across all faculties. Ken lives in Calgary.
In support of WORDSWORTH 2014 SUMMER LITERARY CAMP I am taking part in their SCRAWL-A-THON fundraiser.
Wordsworth is a writing residency for youth between the ages of 12-19. It’s a residency sleepover for a week and a place for them to come and get a writing experience they can’t get anywhere else. It’s a place to come and explore the written word through the arts. We do everything from spoken word, visual poetry, photography, comics, nonfiction, journalism [to] fiction. Every year it changes, and the students come and study it. They eat it, they live it, and they breathe it for a week. We try to bring in instructors that can bring in something unique and different that children wouldn’t get in classrooms or community course.
I have taught for WORDSWORTH in 2011 and 2012 (and plan to return this year) and my daughter is also eager to enroll as a camper this year.
On Saturday March 15 from 4pm-10pm I will endeavour, for 6 hours straight, to create a large-scale visual poem directly on the windows of LOFT112, a new literary space here in Calgary (www.loft122.org). Alongside me will be up to 20 authors, each writing for 6 hours straight, and each trying to raise pledges in support of Wordsworth.
This writing marathon is designed to raise funds and raise awareness for WORDSWORTH — all funds raised will go directly to helping the camp run again this year
I write to ask you for DONATIONS / PLEDGES in support of my 6 hour marathon (and in support of WORDSWORTH) – all donations over $10 will receive a tax receipt through the Writers Guild of Alberta (WGA).
If you are interested in donating – and thus helping an amazing summer camp dedicated to Alberta Youth who are interested in writing — please email me with a brief note, and you can donate online (via credit card) here.
Forthcoming from Les Figues press:
Visual Poetry | $17.00 | ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-55-4 | Binding: Softcover, Perfect
Advance Praise for Kern:
The detritus of signage is all around us. Wherever we look we see signs telling us where to go, what to do, how much it will cost. The 78 poems in Derek Beaulieu’s riveting new collection begin by resembling the signs, logos, and slogans of everyday life—and then become more and more unreadable. No two of these constellations—made individually by hand using dry-transfer lettering (letraset)—are alike; each promises something it cannot quite fulfill, as readability, having failed, gives way to lookability. So suggestive are these images that we cannot stop looking, trying to decipher, to arrest the flow. For the Kern poems present moments of poetic nostalgia for the signposts of a past that never fully existed. Rejecting our advances, they say to the reader/viewer: catch me if you can! And in the meantime, enjoy the promise of each moment: it won’t let you down.
—Marjorie Perloff, Professor emerita Standford University
Kern tweaks the white space of the page, arranging language while unsettling letters. Machines made not of words, but characters, these poems crank and churn, antiquated material rattling to life beneath Beaulieu’s beau frottage. The eye scans the boggled mass, seeing patterns within the patter as words stutter and boil while D.B. minds our b’s and q’s, p’s and d’s.
—Amaranth Borsuk
Do letters have lives? We have to wonder, seduced as we are by the antics of these characters. The tradition of taking alphabetic forms and making them into suggestive glyphs, their phonetic and graphic attributes seeming to cross lines of reading/seeing protocols, has a complex history in the signs of masons, brands, trademarks, monograms and graphical poetics. In Beaulieu’s latest volume, Kern, the principle of enjambment is put to poetic purpose, invoking precedents in work of Hendrik Werkman, Christian Morgenstern, Mary Ellen Solt, and bpNichol, among others. The Canadians have long had a penchant for graphico-visuo-poetics, and Beaulieu’s innovative contribution is a living demonstration that poetry is about unleashing the potential of combinatoric protocols to drive the performative art of letters on a page.
—Johanna Drucker
My Fall 2013 Alberta College of Art + Design ENGLISH 315 students spent a semester studying 21st-Century Canadian Poetry. As their final assignment, they responded to Jordan Scott and Stephen Collis’s book, Decomp, via sound art. Students were responsible for creating pieces of sound art that responded to Decomp‘s text, photography or concepts. Completed assignments were produced in limited edition CDs, cassettes, performances and musical objects, Many of those objects and performances are now compiled here, at the Coach House website.
derek beaulieu's blog 