readings and events at ACAD (and around Calgary) in the next couple weeks!

November 25, 2013 //
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decompMy students, colleagues and I have organized some phenomenal (and free) events at Alberta College of Art + Design and around Calgary over the next few weeks, don’t miss out!

Wednesday NOV 27th 12:30-1:30: Chris Frey and Julia Petrov will be speaking in Room 520 in the last Liberal Studies Speakers Series of 2013 — come on out, bring a friend!

Thursday NOV 28th 5:15: probably Canada’s most important contemporary sound artist / composer, John Oswald, will be talking in Room 595.

Friday NOV 29 12:30-1:50: my ENGL216 students will launch PRY— a zine / compilation of interviews done by ACAD students of local (Calgary and Alberta) artists, writers and poets — in Room 520. Food and drinks will be served. Many of the interviewees will be in attendance at the release party.

Thursday DEC 5 5:30-9:00: (RE)VERB, A multimedia event in response to Decomp by Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott. Featuring a reading and talk by Jordan Scott and performances and sound art pieces by students in ENGL315 (Room 595)

Friday DEC 6 7:30pm at PAGES BOOKS: Jordan Scott will be reading from his new book Decomp (co-written with Stephen Collis and published by Coach House Books) and Aaron Giovannone will be reading selections from his forthcoming book The Loneliness Machine (Insomniac Press)

Thursday DEC 12 7:30pm at PAGES BOOKS: Christian Bök (author of Eunoia), Paul Zits (author of Massacre Street) and I will be reading as part of filling Station magazine’s Flywheel reading series.

and A REMINDER: I’m still hoping to gather 35 working portable manual typewriters for my January 2014 Creative Writing class at ACAD. Can you help?

Microsoft Word - Document1 reverbOswald-Talk

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Learn how to type at ACAD

November 18, 2013 //
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Unknown ACAD Liberal Studies Instructor Derek Beaulieu is planning to teach his students how to type.

Starting in January, every student in Beaulieu’s Creative Writing course will be required to create all of their notes, their assignments and their final projects on portable manual typewriters.

Students will be required to write in class, in coffee houses and on public transit in order to make traditional poetry and prose, but also to use the typewriters to create portraits and music — all in order to explore the artistic possibilities of these sadly neglected machines.

In order to bring these ideas to his students, Beaulieu is seeking the donation of 35 portable, manual typewriters in working condition. 

“Typewriters epitomize the romance of being a writer. Every typewriter harkens back to a golden age: the clack of the keys, the ding of the carriage, the rachetting of the roller. This is an opportunity for students to engage as artists with the sensual, tactile experience of making language.”

Unknown-2Beaulieu has already started to gather a few typewriters, most of which he has found in the dusty corners of shops in Okotoks, Blairmore, Coleman and on the neglected shelves of jumble shops in Calgary. Well-oiled and awaiting the ingenuity of students to bring them alive again, each typewriter allows for a new chance to see these once frequent machines to ring with new projects and manuscripts.

Students will sign out the typewriters and will be required to return them at the end of semester in working order, allowing for an ongoing resource and a chance to offer the class again and again. At the end of semester student projects will be celebrated in a small gallery exhibition on campus.

Old portable typewriters — found in basements, closets and backroom storage — are perfectly ideal for this unusual course as every typewriter will allow a student to treat writing as a hands-on process — a chance to relearn how it felt to write one letter at a time.

ACAD has a rich legacy of hands-on education in craft, design and art — and this course brings all of those ideas to creative writing in one noisy, clacking classroom of student-driven exploration.

Derek Beaulieu can be reached via email

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Calgary writers and community

November 12, 2013 //
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As part of teaching ENGLISH 216: Literature and Community at Alberta College of Art + Design this Fall, I have made sure my students have had a chance to meet and listen to in-class readings by some of Calgary’s most challening and exciting speakers. My student Jennifer Herring recorded many of the class visits. Click below to hear full recording of many of the performances:

October 4: Caitlynn Cummings, managing editor of filling Station magazine

October 18: Christian Bök and Helen Hajnoczky

October 25: Paul Zits

November 1: Natalie Simpson

November 15: Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton

Huge thanks to all of the poets and performers. You’ve helped bring the class – and the Calgarian community – to life.

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review of PLEASE, NO MORE POETRY

November 8, 2013 //
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The November 2013 issue of Alberta Views features a review of Please, No More Poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu:please no more poetry review

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Categories concrete / visual poetry

The Nabokov Paper – An experiment in novel-reading

October 29, 2013 //
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The exhibition The Nabokov Paper – An experiment in novel-reading (accompanied by the book of the same name, For more details contact – thenabokovpaper@gmail.com) opened on October 26th at Shandy Hall …

In April 2012, ten artists, eight writers, six university professors, three translators, two architects, a librarian, a curator, a graphic designer, an illustrator and a computer engineer each selected a question on one of seven course texts: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The responses they turned in take the form of writing, drawing, painting, film, graphs, indexes, lists, maps, newly designed editions, objects, scale-models, a lecture and a reading game. This work, together with an introduction to the aims of the project, is presented in The Nabokov Paper – a publication that acts both as a record of the experiment and an invitation to undertake it again.

Contributors: Graham Allen, James Arnett, Abraham Asfaw, Anne Attali, Katarzyna Bazarnik, Derek Beaulieu, Paul Becker, Christian Bök, Shanna Bosley, Stephen Bury, Chloe Briggs, Kate Briggs, Maurice Carlin, Jennifer Carr, Guillaume Constantin, Jamie Crewe, Véronique Devoldère, Lucia della Paolera, Craig Dworkin, Zenon Fajfer, Helen Frank, Céline Guyot, John Hamilton, Sharon Kivland, Gianni Lavacchini, Anna-Louise Milne, Forbes Morlock, Simon Morris, Amy Pettifer, Lucrezia Russo, Olivia Sautreuil, Nick Thurston, Jane Topping, Madeleine Walton, Patrick Wildgust, Robert Williams and Jack Aylward-Williams, Sarah Wood, Gillian Wylde.

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new from No Press: TWO FROM UKRAINE

October 27, 2013 //
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antonovskyNo Press is proud to announce the publication of a rare opportunity to gain insight in to the range of visual poetry produced in Ukraine. rarely seen in North America, these authors seek dialogue with contemporary international practice while responding to the tradition of visual poetry in Eastern Europe.

TWO FROM UKRAINE a collection of visual poems by Andrí Antonovsky and Volodymyr Bilyk

Each copy of TWO FROM UKRAINE includes:

Scobes by Volodymyr Bilyk (a 16-page visual poetry suite in a hand-stitched edition)

робота така робота by Andrí Antonovsky (a 16-page full-colour collection of Antonovsky’s visual poetry collages in a hand-stitched edition)

bilykComadots by Volodymyr Bilyk (a 4-page visual poetry suite pamphlet)

all of which are gathered in a rubber-stamped envelope and published in a strictly limited edition of 60 copies.

TWO FROM UKRAINE is now available for $12ea.

To order please email derek beaulieu

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Categories concrete / visual poetry, smallpress

new from NO PRESS: Flight Patterns by Braydon Beaulieu

October 11, 2013 //
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pattern-05No Press is proud to announce the publication of Braydon Beaulieu’s FLIGHT PATTERNS.

Produced in a limited edition of 60 hand-bound copies.

Through simple iconography, Flight Patterns maps Beaulieu’s reading patterns while reading Batwoman: Elegy — a visual poetry exploration of reading patterns and panel-ology wher action is suveyed by teh barest of lines and graphic gestures.

FLIGHT PATTERNS is now available for $4ea.

To order please email derek beaulieu

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The Nabokov Paper – An experiment in novel-reading

October 6, 2013 //
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img276-lrgThe Nabokov Paper – An experiment in novel-reading

26th October 13 – 22nd November 13

Project by
Kate Briggs and Lucrezia Russo

Published by
information as material

With work by
Graham Allen, James Arnett, Abraham Asfaw, Anne Attali, Katarzyna Bazarnik, Derek Beaulieu, Paul Becker, Christian Bok, Shanna Bosley,
Stephen Bury, Chloe Briggs, Kate Briggs, Maurice Carlin, Jennifer Carr, Guillaume Constantin, Jamie Crewe, Veronique Devoldere,
Lucia della Paolera, Craig Dworkin, Zenon Fajfer, Celine Guyot, John Hamilton, Sharon Kivland, Gianni Lavacchini, Anna-Louise Milne,
Forbes Morlock, Simon Morris, Amy Pettifer, Lucrezia Russo, Olivia Sautreuil, Nick Thurston, Jane Topping, Madeleine Walton, Patrick Wildgust,
Robert Williams and Jack Aylward-Williams, Sarah Wood, Gillian Wylde.

Opening and book launch
Saturday, October 26, 2013 / 3pm

For more details contact – thenabokovpaper@gmail.com

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review of HOW TO WRITE

October 3, 2013 //
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how-to-writePearl Pirie’s review of How to Write has just been syndicated on The Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWiLA) Blog.

How To Write has immediate power as a kind of one-off joke, a reveal that hits the reader immediately upon engaging with the text; the surface of the book is so clever and punchy that it’s easy to take that for all that it is. But instead of leaving it there, Pirie digs as deeply as she is able, and comes up with great richness as a result. It’s an excellent celebration of the possibilities of literary criticism in long form.

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new at UBUWeb’s Visual Poetry page

September 30, 2013 //
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vp_header11UbuWeb’s Visual Poetry section has just been updated with over 80 new texts including exceedingly rare editions of d.a.levy’s magazines The Buddhist Thirdclass Junkmail Oracle and The Marrahwanna Quarterly and Ed Sander’s Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Complementing these magazines are PDFs of scarce editions by Canadian visual poets David UU, John Riddell and bpNichol; Americans Johanna Drucker and Rosmarie Waldrop and International practicioners such as Max Ernst, Marcel Broodthaers and Bob Cobbing. This update focuses on small press magazines and highlights rarely-seen radical work in collage, overprinting and machine-based visual poetry.

UbuWeb began as an online repository for concrete and visual poetry scanned from aging anthologies and re-imagined as back-lit transmissions from a potential future. As the archive has progressed, the concentration on visual poetry has waned in favour of an reconnoitering of diverse avant-gardes. UbuWeb’s Visual Poetry section exposes little-seen exemplars of historical praxis and models of contemporary insight to a wider audience. This section includes anthologies, ephemeral publications, criticism and sporadic journals dedicated to visual poetry. Due to the elusive and ephemeral nature of concrete and visual poetry publications, there is a perceived lack of innovation in the genre. Without exposure to radical practice, artistic precedent and innovative models, concrete poets too often fall back upon familiar tropes and unchallenging forms. UbuWeb’s Visual Poetry section is not presented under the rubric of historical coverage or indexical completeness, but rather as a document of isolate moments of what Haroldo de Campos argued was a “notion of literature not as craftsmanship but […] as an industrial prcoess” where the poem is a “prototype” rather than the “typical handiwork of artistic artistry.” — derek beaulieu

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