WordsWorth is a week-long sleepover creative writing residency for young writers who believe in the power of words. Writers will be completely immersed in the creative and diverse world of writing. Guided by established and respected artist-instructors, writers will experience writing through fiction, poetry, spoken word, music, drama, film making, monologue and nonfiction. But the experiences don’t begin and end with the classes, WordsWorth is a place where young writers come together to celebrate writing through friendship, campfires, concerts, open mic sessions, hikes, haikus and rousing games of Death Polo in the pool.

I’m teaching in the camp’s third week – and there’s still room to register your teen to join us for an amazing summer!

Arn McBay has animated one of the pieces from ABC: An Abecedarium

order my new chapbook, “ABC – An ABeCeDarium” from Malmo, Sweden’s Timglaset editions

Do you remember your first alphabet? It might have come in the shape of a book with funny pictures depicting animals and objects beginning with a, b, c etc. Or maybe it was a school poster with all the letters, both capitals and lowercase, in an easy to read font. The alphabet is forever inscribed in all of us as the beginning of all reading and writing and that is what makes Derek Beaulieu’s ABC – An ABeCeDarium so special. It’s not an alphabet for novices but rather one for those who are eager to relearn what an alphabet can be and how it can be used.

In ABC Beaulieu uses two outmoded techniques – ink and dry transfer letters – to create an alphabet which is far removed from the one we learned at school but no less beautiful. The dry transfer letters are old and seem to be falling apart, their outlines fractured and parts of individual letters missing completely, creating a kind of beauty which is perfectly in tune with a society where the meaning of words and sentences seem to be crumbling. The ink adds another layer of refreshing destruction to these ragged letters. Blots, splashes and stains further obscure their original shapes. This is indeed an ABeCeDarium, an alphabet so original and strange that it requires a neologism. Browsing through a list of words with the same suffix I stop at crematorium, planetarium and sanitorium. They seem all to have some sort of kinship with Beaulieu’s ABeCeDarium.

Derek Beaulieu, ABC – An ABeCeDarium, 32 pages with 26 plates printed in black and white, handbound with a handmade cover. Edition of 99 copies. 8 EUR + postage.

Photographs of my translation / resetting of Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Des” currently on exhibit at the 48th Poetry International Festival – Rotterdam (photos courtesy Amy Catanzano).

George Elliott Clarke, Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate, features my work in his “Poem of the Month” series . . .

“Tin Soldiers” — one of my typewriter concrete poems, animated by Arn McBay

download Michiel Koelink, Jon Ståle Ritland and David Jonas’s 3DPoetryEditor & write in virtual space.

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.

Watch  my translation of Un coup de Des … [youtube 15:10-16:12)

Why is regular poetry so safe, and what is experimental poetry going to do about it? This week it’s all about visual poetry on No Good Poetry‘s Podcast, so make sure to follow the show notes and see what we are talking about. We are joined by Derek Beaulieu, visual poet and curator of the visual poetry section on UbuWeb. 

CBC Radio Calgary includes my entreaties to students in “so what’s your spiel?“