Lori Emerson has just interviewed me on her blog about concrete poetry, technology and obsolescence…
The Calgary Herald takes an interest in my work in a piece entitled “alt.poet: Derek Beaulieu thinks outside the linguistic box“
No Press is proud to announce the publication of
COPYS
By Craig Dworkin
‘My idea for these poems is that they be like cigarettes. On the one hand, briefly intense and repaying as much focused contemplation as you want to give them — each is in fact composed according to a rigorous and elided formal logic — but then also, at the very same time, merely discardable amusements: quickly read and easily forgotten, thrown away without a second thought as soon as they are finished.’ — Craig Dworkin
Originally published in the UK by Matchbox in May 2007, No press is proud to return this rarely-seen edition to print.
Published in a limited edition of 50 copies (25 of which are for sale) each copy consists of 34 loose cards in a hand-typed envelope.
Copies are available for $8.00 each (including postage).
To order, please contact derek beaulieu
This past spring, a.rawlings spent time in Toronto’s Malvern Collegiate Institute and facilitated over thirty interviews between high-school students and Canadian poets. The Great Canadian Writer’s Craft: High-school students interview Canadian poets is now available online and features interviews with poets from across Canada (including myself).
Four videos of my performance May 29, 2011 in Calgary’s Riley Park as part of the filling Station / Pooka Press Pub Crawl (as recorded by Helen Hajnoczky):
Ara Shirinyan’s Your Country is Great: Afghanistan – Guyana (Futurepoem books, 130 pp., $15.00) is a poetic engagement with travel writing and geopolitics, where every country from Afghanistan to Guyana (I assume there will be a second volume for the remaining countries) is defined solely through the flattened language of the internet.
Your Country is Great mines online citations of each country’s qualities and gathers them into mind-numbing scripts of unceasing inanities, “instead of accepting current notions of language as a medium of differentiation” Shirinyan “demonstrates its leveling quality, demolishing meaning into a puddle of platitudes.”
Your Country is Great is composed of 81 different poems, one per country, each of which is written solely through internet searches on “[country name] is great.” The results—with all the typographic and syntactic errors intact—are then simply arranged. Shirinyan’s only concession to the ‘poetic’ is enforcing line breaks.
Shirinyan empties the word “great” of all context and force, flattens it to the level of punctuation – suddenly every place on earth is “great”: “I don’t need no dude to say / that Barbados is great / for me to know that”, “”Belarus is great and amazing”, “”Brazil is great; amazing food, intelligent people”, “Canada is great!”, “Ecuador is great!: / ‘don’t be afraid.’” The platitudes are unceasing, but this communal writing also undermines itself.
The barrage of ‘greatness’ empties as the internet’s choir of voices offers such caveats to praise as “’living’ in Belgium is great, / although the deathmetal scene is / not that big over there” and “the need to reduce fat intake in Belgium / is great / and a thorough approach / is desirable.” The rhetoric of travel narratives, and even postcards home from wandering tourists (the mindless prattle of “Having a great time, wish you were here!”), are flattened into a sameness where every destination no matter how mundane is “great” simply because “The people are great, / a lot like us.”
Shirinyan’s Your Country is Great: Afghanistan – Guyana poeticizes the mundane, and makes the language of hyperbole tangible by emptying out its strength. This book is great.
Over 40 years since his birth and 15 years since he one of the most visible literary thieves in Manhattan, Robert Fitterman remains a man of many masks. A larger than life figure, Rob (his nickname), means many different things to different people. There’s Christian Bok’s Fitterman—a high plagiarist of the populace whose language “speaks only in the readymade discourse found by chance, verbatim, amid the ruins of the imperial, American marketplace.” But then again, there’s Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fitterman, a pickpocket “virtually ambling through the harrowlingly dislocated […] landscape.” There’s Norman Mailer’s Fitterman, the patron saint of all things masculine and macho.
Who, out of those writers, is right?
All of them are.
Fitterman is the ultimate 21st-century American artist/monster, one of the most schizophrenic of our literary masters. His biases shackle a great deal of his work to his time, but they are part of a total package intractable from the man himself.
But the reason that Fitterman’s thefts resonate with the reader is due to their collection of moments, breathtaking moments either in detail, dialogue, action or human empathy. In addition to the poetry, this kind of evocation is also reflected in his métier—the stolen story, where, with his soaring use of plainspoken diction and speech, Fitterman, along with Ernest Hemingway, Louis Zukofsky and all of the American Poet Laureates, kicks down the door that Mark Twain opened for the American demotic to come into our literature.
I’m not saying that Rob the Plagiarist is a classic, nor am I saying that it’s great or even very good. All that I am saying is that it’s a good collection that shouldn’t be totally thrown away.
The Fitterman sentence, the particular cultural trademark that established him in the world’s consciousness for so long, is here and it is as advertised. The beauty of Fitterman’s sentences didn’t come in any biblical/Shakespearean prose rhythms (Faulkner) or obsession for perfect lyrical beauty (Fitzgerald, although Fitterman is just as obsessed about writing, maybe more so). No, the poetry in Fitterman’s thievery lies in it’s succinctness, it’s clarity, it’s austerity, it’s lack of excess or pretense—and the way he lifts a product, a scene or a setting—also contributes to his greatness.
Whether the scenes takes place in suburban drive-thru coffee shops, or the beautiful landscapes of middle America, or the mini-mall at the exact tension-filled moment where the shopper and the mall-cop begin combat, one marvels on how he can say so much in such a small space, and do it in such a unique and beautifully American manner. His language in itself makes him indispensable, and its beauty is in abundance here.
hobo magazine #13 features interviews with Michelle Williams, Tom Robbins and some of my visual poetry in a special poetry insert — look for it!
OK, turn the clown off. This is who was in the White House. This is the, uh, this, this is what I’m giving you an example of what the Obamas have done to America ah culturally and socially. They bring a tenth-rate clown like this in who boasts about that he teaches his children how to, uh, his students, so to speak, at the once ex University of Pennsylvania. It’s become a cesspool, uh, what’s happened there. And talks about uncreative writing and how to plagiarize, you hear? Now, when you have a, uh, uh, plagiarist in the White House you would think having a plagiarist pretending to be a poet in the White House in a poetry event … what is this, like, Abbie Hoffman 2? I mean, this is what I’m talking about here, this is not poetry; this is the debasement of our culture. It’s part of the Marxist class warfare. This is what he does and this is what he does and this is how he does it. You say “what are you going on about?” All right, bring it on, I’m showing you who he had there. It wasn’t just the rapper, he has this putz there talking about teaching children, uh, you can’t write anything creative and original, you have to plagiarize everything you turn in. This is a teacher in a college. This is what’s going passing now for a college teacher. It goes back to Obama inviting a so-called college teacher who teaches children to te- to write uncreative writing, where you’re not allowed to write anything original you must plagiarize. It’s the same mentality. It’s the destruction of western civilization. In that sense Obama is acting in a rather s-schizophrenic manner to have a poetry event and invite someone who teaches children that that they must plagiarize. You follow where I’m coming from here?
Right. Yeah.
Alright, it’s a little too esoteric, I get it.
creation of Text festival Commission, April 2011 (photograph by Phil Davenport)
creation of Text festival Commission, April 2011 (photograph by Phil Davenport)
Having returned to Canada from the Text Festival in Bury, UK, I have a few new photographs of the creation of my piece (with Festival Curator Tony Trehy in the background). Courtesy of Phil Davenport, these photographs document the creation of my vinyl-letter and letraset-based visual poem on the glass doors of Bury’s Fusilier Museum.
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