I was commissioned by Calgary Arts Development to create a piece of text art in response to the 2015 Mayor’s Lunch for Arts Champions and to be unveiled to Calgary City Council as part of the Mayor’s Poetry Challenge. I have just completed the rubber-stamp folio “Every Word”…
In the Know: Splash of Red is a fundraising benefit and art auction that gathers trendsetters, influencers and thought leaders wanting to show their support in the fight against HIV/AIDS. To raise awareness and funds for this important cause, the evening will feature a silent art auction. Join us for an evening of hors d’oeuvres, dancing and incredible live entertainment featuring the Dirty Gramophones, Ellen Doty and Fable. Be creative and come dressed in a #SplashofRed
I am donating an original signed & dated artwork as part of the silent auction. This piece (which will also soon be unveiled as a monumental permanent installation at Roehampton University in London) was constructed as part of residency as the first artist-in-residence at the Arts Commons Lightbox Studio. With a suggested price of $500, all proceeds will go towards supporting HIV Community Link.
Untitled (2014) derek beaulieu. Dry-transfer lettering on paper. Paper size 16″h x 20″w / Image size 6″h x 8″w
On May 2nd i’ll be volunteering at Calgary’s Shelf Life Books (time TBA) as part of AUTHORS FOR INDIES DAY. As Anne-Marie MacDonald wrote:
That’s when authors across Canada volunteer at local independent bookstores. We will talk to customers about the books we love. We will shamelessly urge them to buy. Not just our books, any books. Because the goal of Authors for Indies Day is to help Canadian independent bookstores sell a ton of books on May 2.
Derek Beaulieu, Calgary’s Poet Laureate, discusses his visual poem Prose of the Trans-Canada (Bookthug, 2011) and how the poem was crafted with an eye towards cartography and contemporary graphic design. The poem was projected on the high-resolution screen in the Visualization Studio of the Taylor Family Digital Library. Photo by Dave Brown
At a public lecture last month in the Taylor Family Digital Library, Calgary Poet Laureate Derek Beaulieu presented his work Prose of the Trans-Canada, an eye-catching, contemporary visual response to La prose du transsibérien by high modernists Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay in 1913.
Beaulieu’s work combines traditional poetry with cartography and graphic design into a dynamic field which is designed to be looked at instead of read.
The massive 24.5-million pixel screen in the TFDL’s Visualization Studio allowed for the high-resolution projection of both poems, treating audience members to the discovery of detail and nuance that would be otherwise undetectable.
This representation manifests in multiple ways — abstractly, poetically, even symbolically. Published in 1913, La prose du transsibérien is 1/150 the height of the Eiffel Tower. Beaulieu’s concrete poem, published a century later, is 1/150 the height of the Calgary Tower.
“Not only did I have the rare pleasure of seeing Cendrars’ work side by side with my own, and in a new light, the Visualization Studio allowed me a unique approach to teaching. It was a real glimpse into the future of the classroom,” said Beaulieu.
“These poems are major achievements in the evolution of the artist book,” French professor Jean-Jacques Poucel said in his introductory remarks at the February event. “Each offers, in its own way, a lasting artistic representation of the rapidly shifting modernity of two cosmopolitan cities, Paris and Calgary.”
For Poucel — whose graduate seminar Modern and Contemporary Poetics inspired this public lecture — both digital and tangible formats are important.
“I’m pleased my students also have access to paper facsimiles of these poems in the university’s collections,” he says. “This dual experience broadens their perspectives about concrete poetry and the artists who create it.”
This event was sponsored by the Department of French, Italian and Spanish with support from Libraries and Cultural Resources. Facsimiles of the poems are held in Archives and Special Collections. They may be viewed by appointment by contacting specccoll@ucalgary.ca.
Arnold McBay has incorporated a pair of my visual poems into Fresnel lenses in his new exhibition Parallax, now on display at the Gimsby Public Art Gallery .
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Calgary ArtsCommon’s Stephen Magazine has just published my reflections on being the first artist-in-residence in the Lightbox Studio. Pick up a free copy today!
Cultural Weekly has recently reviewed Kern...
Ordinary language can hardly do justice to these poems by Derek Beaulieu. Utilizing signs, logos and slogans, these suggestive glyphs make for unprecedented concrete poetry. Beaulieu is a renowned member of the Poetry avant-garde and is currently the Poet Laureate of Calgary, Canada. In his author’s note, Beaulieu writes, “Kern is made by using dry-transfer lettering without the use of computers. Ubiquitous in graphic design, technical drafting, and advertising from the early 1960s to early 1990s, dry-transfer lettering was used in order to standardize graphic elements, eliminate the individuality of the artists’ hand, and speed up the creative process.” He constructs these poems without the help of plans or sketches, creating each one by hand a letter at a time. The resulting image-field created by Beaulieu is similar to an abstract painting and can even be called otherworldly. Marjorie Perloff says these poems, “present moments of poetic nostalgia for the signposts of a past that never fully existed.”
This book is the latest in Les Figues’s “Global Poetics Series,” and definitely carries on their reputation of pushing poetic boundaries. The book begins with simple logos and gradually evolves and explodes into complicated constellations. As the author writes, “These poems are the street-signs, the signage, and the advertising logos for the shops and corporations that are just beyond reach. They are not islands of meaning—semantic or corporate.” Similar to the “performative typography” espoused by Douglas Kearney, these poems present arresting images that transcend tradition or even description. Beaulieu “occupies the page in the same way that the Nike swoosh sits on a shoe, or how the neon overwhelms the Tokyo streetscape.”
Chris Turnbull has recently replaced my visual poems in the Baxter Conservation Area after the 1st series were destroyed by the weather…
derek beaulieu's blog 