Calgary’s FFWD magazine has interviewed me about Please, No More Poetry and the changing face of poetics
Counterpath is seeking performance, film, sound, writing, and
visual work that directly responds to or reads Writing Surfaces: The
Selected Fiction of John Riddell (2012, Wilfrid Laurier University
Press).
John Riddell’s work embraces game play, unreadability and
illegibility, procedural work, non-representational narrative,
photocopy degeneration, collage, handwritten texts, and gestural
work. His self-aware and meta-textual short fiction challenges the
limits of machine-based composition and his reception as a
media-based poet.
Riddell is best known for “H” and “Pope Leo, El ELoPE,” a pair of
graphic fictions written in collaboration with, or dedicated to,
bpNichol, but his work moves well beyond comic strips into a
series of radical fictions. In Writing Surfaces, derek beaulieu and
Lori Emerson present “Pope Leo, El ELoPE” and many other works
in a collection that showcases Riddell’s remarkable mix of largely
typewriter-based concrete poetry mixed with fiction and drawings.
Riddell’s oeuvre fell out of popular attention, but it has recently
garnered interest among poets and critics engaged in media studies
(especially studies of the typewriter) and experimental writing. As
media studies increasingly turns to “media archaeology” and the
reading and study of antiquated, analogue-based modes of
composition (typified by the photocopier and the fax machine as
well as the typewriter), Riddell is a perfect candidate for renewed
appreciation and study by new generations of readers, authors, and
scholars.
Counterpath will host an evening of approximately 5 performances of 10-15 minutes each on
December 14, 2013, at 7 p.m.
Please send a proposal of not more than 250 words to Counterpath
program coordinator Oren Silverman (os@counterpathpress.org) by October 31, 2013.
The University of Calgary’s Gauntlet newspaper has interviewed me on “Advice for aspiring poets” in which i plead that emerging poets should “Make it fucked up, make it strange, make it digital, make it infected…”
Cecile Bjørgås Jordheim has a new performance of her “First of All There is Blue” which was inspired by my novel Local Colour: Ghosts, variations:
Konsert–performance
Torsdag 19. september kl. 21.00
Kunstnernes Hus, Foajé
Gratis inngang
Cecile Bjørgås Jordheim, Stine Janvin Motland (vokal) og Jo Fougner Skaansar (kontrabass)
The project is based on the first paragraph in Paul Auster’s novella Ghosts. The composition consists of 3 short movements. The first movement is the original text straight from the book, the two following movements are versions of the paragraph that has been trough Google Translate so many times that the text is altered into strange sentences and meanings. The composition was done by isolating the letters C, D, E, F, G, A, B in the text and using them in a notational system to indicate pitch. The absence of the characters in between the chosen letters indicate the durations/note values.
More information, and a recording of a previous iteration of the performance, can be found here.
The project was initiated by Canadian poet Derek Beaulieu and In Edit Mode Press in Malmö, Sweden and is entitled Local Colour: Ghosts, variations. The collection takes as its point of departure Paul Auster’s novella Ghosts, and Beaulieu’s reworking of Auster’s text, Local Colour. It invites a number of writers, poets, musicians and artists to contribute with further reworkings, intermedial translations and editing projects exploring various intersections between Auster’s text and Beaulieu’s graphic interpretation. The resulting volume consists of four bound volumes, a series of pamphlets and prints, an audio-CD and a piece of computer software.
The best thing about any poetry reading is the beer — and now you can have both in one handy combination.
The fine folks at Broken Dimanche press have revamped their website and have a few copies remaining of “The Kakofonie 005” by Eric Zboya and myself in an edition of 60 copies.
There were a very limited number of bottles which were filled with small-brew craft beer brewed by Olivier Maarschalk.
Now there are only bottles without beer available for €10. For more information, or to order, go here.
LOCAL COLOUR; GHOSTS, VARIATIONS
Ola Ståhl, Carl Lindh & Derek Beaulieu
Malmö: Publication Studio Malmö / In Edit Mode Press, 2012
ISBN: 978-91-977853-4-1
Set including a series of perfect bound, paperback volumes, a book of photographs, a CD and a piece of software. First edition: 200 copies.
Release date: Dec 20, 2012
Retail price: €58
“Local Colour; ghosts, variations” takes as its point of departure, Paul Auster’s novella “Ghosts,” and, in particular, Derek Beaulieu’s reworking of Auster’s text, “Local Colour,” in which the entirety of Auster’s text has been removed, leaving only the chromatic words spread across the otherwise blank pages as coloured rectangles. “Local Colour; Ghosts, variations” picks up on the way in which Beaulieu’s piece seems to split Auster’s narrative text open by rendering it purely graphical, freeing it up, by the same gesture, to an excess and a bifurcation of meaning. Seeking to extend and amplify this ambition, the collection invites other writers, poets, musicians, and artists to implement procedures and process that allow them to do Beaulieu what Beaulieu did to Auster; that is, to split his colour rectangles open and see can be done with what is revealed. Contributors include Derek Beaulieu, Steve Giasson, Cia Rinne, Peder Alexis Olsson, Jörgen Gassilewski, Craig Dworkin, Elisabeth Tonnard, Martin Glaz Serup, Eric Zboya, Ola Ståhl, Pär Thörn, Carl Lindh, Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, Ola Lindefelt, Andreas Kurtsson, Helen White, Gary Barwin, Magda Tyzlik-Carver and Andy Prior.
Ola Ståhl
Malmö: Publication Studio Malmö / In Edit Mode Press, 2013
No ISBN
First edition: 200 copies
Release date: Dec 2, 2012
Retail price: €7
Double-sided poster by Ola Ståhl presenting all the colours rectangles in Derek Beaulieu’s graphical reworking of Paul Auster’s novella “Ghosts” in the order in which they appear but printed as long, slim strips on glossy paper. On one side of the poster, the nuances are those that appear in Beaulieu’s manuscript. For the opposite side of the poster, however, a cipher, the key to which was found in an hollowed out coin in Brooklyn in the 1950s, was used to create an alternate set of numeric sequences from the CMYK numbers of the colours used in Beaulieu’s piece. From these numeric sequences a different set of CMYK numbers, and thus a different set of colours, was generated. Treated the same way as the original colour series, these are the colours presented on the other side of the poster.
Carl Lindh & Ola Ståhl
Malmö: Publication Studio Malmö / In Edit Mode Press, 2013
No ISBN
Music box and scroll. Limited and numbered edition of 10 copies.
Release date: Dec 2, 2012
Retail price: €115
Replicating Derek Beaulieu’s “Local Colour” – a graphical reworking of Paul Auster’s novella “Ghosts” – as a scroll and cutting out each coloured rectangle, leaving only a series of tiny perforations, Ola Ståhl & Carl Lindh’s “Apparition” extends the translation process initiated in Beaulieu’s rendering graphical of Auster’s text, only here the graphical manuscript is translated into a sequence of absences – holes, punctures – reemerging spectrally as sound as the scroll is fed through the music box. Each numbered copy is fully functional and contains both music box and scroll.
No Press is proud to announce the publication of Kenneth Goldsmith’s BEING DUMB
Produced in a limited edition of 60 hand-bound copies.
From BEING DUMB:
“I am a dumb writer, perhaps one of the dumbest that’s ever lived. Whenever I have an idea, I question myself whether it is sufficiently dumb. I ask myself, is it possible that this, in any way, could be considered smart? If the answer is no, I proceed. I don’t write anything new or original. I copy pre-existing texts and move information from one place to another. A child could do what I do, but wouldn’t dare to for fear of being called stupid.”
Originally published online at The Awl, BEING DUMB is now available for $7ea.
To order please email derek beaulieu
under my housepress & no press imprints i’ve published 500 editions since 1997. . . 16 years of small press editions, each made by hand in my kitchen. Here’s a 2008 interview with Sina Queyras about the press . . . There are new editions planned from Kenneth Goldsmith, Volodymyr Bilyk, Andrí Antonovsky, Yuriy Zavadsky, Keren Katz, Braydon Beaulieu, Amaranth Borsuk, Kaie Kellough, Matthew Frederick George, Arturo Robertazzi and more.
The American Reader has just excerpted some samples from Please, No More Poetry; the poetry of derek beaulieu.
“The Newspaper” by derek beaulieu (photo courtesy Eric Schmaltz)
“The Newspaper” by derek beaulieu (photo courtesy Eric Schmaltz)
“Protein 13” (detail) by Christian Bok (photo courtesy Eric Schmaltz)
“Solilioquy” (detail) by Kenneth Goldsmith (photo courtesy Eric Schmaltz)
“Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art” has opened at Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery — here are a few early pictures from the opening (courtesy Eric Schmaltz)
derek beaulieu's blog 