I’m thrilled to announce that Astra Papachristodoulou’s Poem Atlas – a small, London-based press focusing on poetic objects – has just published my FUTURE POEMS! Designed to mimic the format of scratch-off lottery cards, each edition of FUTURE POEMS has a grey scratch-off panel which reveals a provocation about the future of poetry. Produced in a very limited edition, FUTURE POEMS won’t be around for long, order today!
As Banff’s Poet Laureate, I invite musicians and performers to create digital sound performances (song, composition, collage, digital, etc.) of my punctuation-only book, SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS.
SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS erases the entirety of John Cage’s book of the same name, leaving only the fields of punctuation: the silence of breath, pause and atmospheric noise (more info here)
I invite you to create a sonic interpretation of any section in the book, save it online and tweet out your results with the hashtag #beaulieusilence. This is a community-based generative project and everyone is welcome, let’s see where your creativity takes you!
Initial responses / performances are here:
Copies of SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS can be ordered here …
NEW FROM TIMGASET EDITIONS:
SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS by DEREK BEAULIEU
In 1961 John Cage published his seminal book of essays, SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS. In that collection of essays, Cage expounds his theoretical framework and compositional style, and builds upon 4′33″. 4′33″—frequently disparaged as a farce played upon a devoted audience—is a composition which, focusses the musical potential of the ambient sounds of performance halls and shuffling audiences. While the audience is visually captivated by the (non)movements of the pianist, the auditory experience—the performance itself—takes place with the creaking of chairs, the clicking of HVAC systems, the coughing and jittering of uncomfortable audience members; 4′33″ is as much about the structures of performativity as it is about critical and close listening; the allowing of small ambient noises to be considered with as much import as musical notes on an orchestral score.
With his edition of SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS, Derek Beaulieu has created a visual response to Cage’s SILENCE, or more accurately, to a poorly-scanned PDF version found online found on monoskop.org (which coincidently also hosts a PDF edition of his a, A Novel). On each page Beaulieu has deleted all the text except the punctuation marks—which visually represents breath, pauses and breaks—and the grime and digital “noise” on the poorly-scanned page, the creaking digital performance space, of Cage’s lectures.
SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS is published in a form which mimics the size and shape of Cage’s Wesleyan UP edition, with the addition of a critical, explanatory afterword by noted scholar Peter Jaeger, grounding the edition in ambient sound, erasure, Buddhism, and conceptual writing.
Digitally printed in an edition of 200 copies, 304 pages, size 170×200 mm, with a full colour matte laminated cover.
Officially launched at the London Small Publishers’ Fair 2023, October 27-28, 2023.
Small presses, imprints, and reading series hold an incredibly important role in the development of artistic communities, movements, and aesthetic values. I strongly recommend AMONG THE NEIGHBORS, a magazine series — effectively a monograph series — edited by Edric Mesmer under his auspices as Poetry Cataloguer at SUNY Buffalo. Mesmer is also a poet (check out his BlazeVox title Poems: now and then), and brings a passion for poetry to his editing, each volume highlights a historic or contemporary poetic community. Each issue is vital, providing bibliographical information, personal narratives, interviews and historic overviews of ephemeral publishing venues which have transformed the scene.
A special note should also be made of rob mclennan’s blog post on Among The Neighbors, perhaps the only piece of criticism in response to the series to date. (I’ve swiped the photograph for this post from rob’s blog…)
There have been 23 issues to date. The first 10 issues are available as free downloadable PDFs but physical copies of every issue are also available for free. Email Edric Mesmer at esmesmer@buffalo.edu for more information…
AMONG THE NEIGHBORS #1-23:
23 – Published at the Poetry Project: a bibliography of the little magazines and small press books published at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-The Bowery / Nick Sturm
22 – “Kindred Spirits Spark”: An Exploration of the Origins and Evolution of The Sisters of Color Writers Collective and its Literary Journal SEEDS / Esperanza Cintrón and Lori Anderson Moseman
21 – A Bibliography of Belladonna* Collaborative Chaplets 2000–2020 / Krystal Languell
19.2 – About Telephone: An Interview with Maureen Owen / M.C. Kinniburgh
19.1 – About Telephone: An Introduction & Bibliography / M.C. Kinniburgh
18 – Silver in My Mines: Peter Hay’s Work for Two Rivers Press, 1994-2003 / Geoff Sawers
16 – Talking of Curtains / Paul Buck
15 – Umbra magazine (1963-1974): An Introduction and Bibliography / David Grundy
14 – On The Doris / Tamas Panitz & Billie Chernicoff, editors
11 – Washington, DC Poetry: Mass Transit and Folio Books Reading Series / Tina Darragh, with an appendix by Edric Mesmer
10 – Teaching the Little Magazine / Michael Leong
9 – Cultural Shape-shifters: cartonera publishers / Ksenija Bilbija
8 – Editing O.ARS: 1981–1993 / Donald Wellman
6 – A Bibliography of John Bennett’s Vagabond Press, 1966–2005 / Christopher Harter
4 – Skanky Possum Press: A (Personal) Genealogy / Dale Smith
3 – TISH: Another “Sense of Things” / Derek Beaulieu
2 – In Search of Blew: An Eventual Index of Blewointment Magazine, 1963–1977 / Gregory Betts
NEW from SEEN STUDIO!
LAY-OUT #4 is available for order today!
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Derek Beaulieu is a poet, artist, writer and the author of twenty-six books of poetry, conceptual fiction, and critical writing, as well as a voluminous amount of chapbooks. His LAY—OUT contribution centers on his visual poetry work using dry-transfer lettering (think Letraset and the like) to create disorienting and expressive works that point towards meaning but center on feeling and expression above all else. Instead of simply presenting these hypnotic pieces in a polite and archival manner, Beaulieu — working with SEEN Studio — has elected to combine the poems, overprinting them in saturated pink, blue and yellow, making totally new disorienting compositions out of the old. Colors blend, compositions expand, and one’s retinas grow woozy taking it all in.
What’s more, much to the chagrin of a number of printers that will no longer return LAY—OUT’s calls, the Beaulieu’s poems are combined and printed in a random manner such that each copy of the book is a totally unique. To be sure: every copy of the book has 32 pink images, 32 blue images and 32 yellow images. But one yellow image may appear on page 12 or one copy of the book and on 29 of another. And the blue poem that is overprinted with a particular blue and pink image will be combines with two totally different poems in another copy of the book. So while your copy contains the same 96 pieces as every other copy of this volume the particular combination and order of your book does not exist anywhere else. This is (literally) a one-of-a-kind book!
Hero-level interior page Risograph printing by Dave Bow at Mudlust Industries. Cover screenprinting by Jayes Caitlin at Heavy Gel.
I’m excited to announce that my out-of-print collection KERN, originally published by Les Figues in 2014, will be newly re-issued by Punctum Books … watch this space for more information coming soon!
My “A Poem should mean”, a meditation on visuality and poetics (& excerpted from Surface Tension, as published by Coach House Books), is featured on RIGHTCLICKSAVE in discussion of the OBJKT SBJKT exhibition in Paris…
No Press is excited to announce the publication of
CREMATE LIMITATIONS by Gary Barwin.
Published in a hand-sewn limited edition of 50 copies, CREMATE LIMITATIONS is Gary Barwin’s exploration of AI technology to generate and expand derek beaulieu’s visual poetry into banners of asemic texts. Each page unfolds and expands letter forms into dream-like pools of gestures and marks, a squirming mass of almost-letters, each suggesting another language just out of reach.
Accompanying the poetry suite is an essay, also generated using AI, which posits a critical point of view on the edges of sense around “deficit stumps and surrender quarterlies.”
Each copy of CREMATE LIMITATIONS is $8, email derek@housepress.ca to order your copy today!
Paper View Books has just published this beautiful riso-printed A3-sized limited edition print of my visual poetry — order your copy today (12€) by emailing info@paperviewbooks.pt ; they’ll go quick!
derek beaulieu's blog 