Anthony Etherin’s Shropshire, UK-based Pentaract press has just published my
Five Poems (for Leonard Dawe)
“A leaflet presenting five visual poems inspired by the strange story of Leonard Dawe, a wartime teacher and crossword compiler for The Daily Telegraph, who, at the time of the D-Day invasion, became the unwitting subject of an MI5 espionage investigation….”
Copies are available for £2 plus p&p. Paypal is preferred. To order, please email penteractpress@gmail.com.
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nce again, December brings an opportunity to reflect upon the year’s publications. Like previous years, my “most engaging books” list reflects what i found most fascinating / useful / generative. Seek out these volumes, every one will reward the search. Your local, independent, bookstore can help…. This is the cream of the crop for 2016, seriously:
Poetry
Non-Fiction
Work in Translation
I just ordered the books for my winter term ENGL1118 (creative writing – fiction) course at Mount Royal University: Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener, Lyn Hejinian’s My LIfe, Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a place in Paris, Jonathan Ball’s Ex Machina and Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths — gonna be a great course!
Thanks to the efforts of my colleagues Kit Dobson, Michelle Bodnar, Richard Harrison, Micheline Maylor, Natalie Meisner and Beth Everest, we staged another pop-up poetry typewriter event at Mount Royal University — it was great fun to share these machines with students, create poetry on demand and have some great conversations. 
2 sneak previews of my resetting of Stéphane Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Des” using 3Dpoetryeditor.
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.
The final moving, dynamic, evolving piece will premiere at Poetry International in Rotterdam, June 2017.
3Dpoetryeditor (3DPE) was designed by Jon Staale Ritland, Jan Baeke, Michiel Koelink and David Jonas.
Thank you Mount Royal University’s SUMMIT magazine for including me in a discussion about the state of contemporary poetry…
My newest chapbook Vexations 2: Xerox workstation 5755 is now out from Puddles of Sky Press; thank you Michael Casteels for publishing this small edition! (click to order a copy)
After some technical challenges, Rosemary Griebel and I have re-installed one of my visual poems in the plaza next to Calgary’s Pages Books …
Spray-painted in special bio-degradable ink, this stencil will only be visible when it rains (let’s hope for a rainy autumn), the rest of the time it will be unapparent underfoot. The YYC LITERARY SIDEWALKS initiative, funded and spearheaded by Rosemary Griebel at the Calgary Public Library and Shelley Youngblut at Wordfest will eventually bring 11 different stenciled literary moments to Calgary’s streets …
The second of a projected 10 volumes, VEXATIONS decomposes the score of Erik Satie’s masterpiece through repeated photocopy degeneration. Beaulieu’s VEXATIONS moves writing towards “furniture music.”
Each volume uses a different photocopier to degenerate Satie’s score – with startlingly unique results. Taken as a 10-book suite, the completed project will present 840 variations (84 variations per book over 10 books)
Purchase a copy here (limited edition of 26 copies; 176 pages $26 + shipping)
Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif,
il sera bon de se préparer au préalable,
et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses
—Erik Satie
(“In order to play the theme 840 times in succession,
it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand,
and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities”)
—Erik Satie
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