Thunder 1 (2016)

Thunder 2 (2016)

Thunder 3: clap (2016)

Thunder 4: whore (2016)

Thunder 5 (2016)

Thunder 6: shut the door (2016)

Thunder 7 (2017)

Thunder 8 (2017)

Thunder 9: cough (2017)

Thunder 10: Norse Gods (2017)

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.

St.Catharine’s Arn McBay has created a new translation of my Prose of the Trans-Canada … as McBay explains:

In my conversion/translation of Derek Beaulieu’s Prose of the Trans-Canada the neutral space of the original text is formed by random binary code, while the original letter forms are now formed by/as space. What was previously neutral space is amplified and foregrounded through the use of an on-line text/image converter application. I’m interested in re-reading and re-framing this work in order to demonstrate its generative potential as well as create a new work.

(download the image and zoom in for the full-effect of McBay’s translation)

“First of All there is Blue“, “Brown and I got Ham” and “This Section includes Education”– 3 musical tracks by Stine Janvin Motland (vocals) and Per Zanussi (double bass), composed by Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim based on my novel LOCAL COLOUR … 

Coming soon from Chile’s Pez Espiral …

Arnold McBay has started printing visual poems by his peers on birch bark he has harvested himself – i’m honoured to have work in his early attempts alongside Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin and bpNichol …

CBC News Calgary interviews me about my favourite holiday read: Moby Dick …

I’m proud to have an excerpt from A A NOVEL (forthcoming form Jean Boite Editions) in UNLIMITED/IMPRINT #2: a PDF journal that asks to be shared, gleaned, edited, hacked & remixed. For more information, click

here for to be on the subscriber list

or here to download the most recent issue via dropbox

new from No PRESS:

passagenarbeit by Benjamin Groh

Produced in a limited edition of 50 copies, 20 of which are for sale.

$2.50ea.

to order , please email derek beaulieu at derek@housepress.ca

These visual poems degenerate a passage from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” They present hieroglyphs, streets driven through Benjamin’s words by the work of history, arcades to walk through without stopping, and citations in the book of creation

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!