There are ten “thunderwords” in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the first nine are 100 letters long, the last 101. While they are aurally constructed to sound like thunder, they are not purely onomatopoetic words: they are assembled from multi-linguistic words and fragments. These 10 pieces (pencil and rubber-stamp on newsprint; image size 12″x12″, paper size 18″x24″) reproduce Joyce’s thunderwords as 10×10 grids, each a perverse word-search puzzle.

Thunder – new from Portugal’s Paper View Books — gathers this suite into a limited edition chapbook. Order your copy today for 9€ direct from the press…

The Banff Canmore Community Foundation and I discussed my role as Banff’s Poet Laureate, my ideas around poetry and community – check it out!

Over on Twitter, I am erasing all the text from John Cage’s SILENCE, leaving only the punctuated breath & atmospheric noise – creating a series of JPG files, one per page spread.

Arnold McBay has just posted a sound interpretation of this project, unleashing a mighty savage noise. As McBay explained, he “downloaded a jpg [from this series], dumped it as raw data into the free audio mixing software Audacity and voila….Noise sauvage!”
Have a listen (crank it up but watch your ears!)

My minimalist piece “The blank white page contains the finest song” has just been published by Scotland’s Essence Press; a press dedicated to thoughtful, minimalist work — order your copy today; they’ll go *very* quick!

Over on twitter follow @silence36887462 as I embark on a daily practice of erasing all the text from John Cage’s SILENCE, leaving only the punctuated breath and atmospheric noise – creating a series of JPG files, one per page spread.

No press is proud to announce the publication of 5 new chapbooks!

“MS Word Variations 1-11” by ajCarruthers

• fragile digitally-constructed visual poems, each arranged letter by letter in MS Word into delicate chandeliers of letterforms.

“Little Songs” by Kyle Flemmer

• minimalist diagrams exploring the metrics, stresses and rhyme schemes of a variety of sonnet forms. Sonnets leveled to austere minimalism.

“Brief Lives” by Nick Montfort

• a short found novel constructed from the forms and schematics which bring bring our life meaning.

“The Spectre of Mallarme” by Remi Forte

• beautiful, spectre-clouds based on the layout and design of Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Des”; each a fog of suggestion, a mist of potential.

“STELLA” by Danni Storm

• digitally-manipulated fields of typed letters form and overlap into captivating patterned stars.

Each book is published in a strictly limited edition of 50 handbound copies.

Order any individual book for $6 (+ $1 postage), or all 5 for $30 (including postage) by emailing derek@derekbeaulieu

Copies will go fast, order today!

Pre-order your copy of THE BOOK OF PENTERACT from Penteract Press: 45 contributors, 200 full-colour pages, hardback with ribbon and bands: a fabulous overview of experimental, constraint-based and visual poetics…