If all goes as planned for local poet and Alberta College of Art and Design writing instructor Derek Beaulieu, fledgling scribes across Calgary will soon be seen loudly tapping away at portable typewriters in public places.

By Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald.

They will be on the CTrain. In coffee shops. In the class room. Just about anywhere you would see fledgling writers tapping silently away on laptops.

“We are going to have that sound back in the culture again,” says Beaulieu, in an interview at a typewriter-free coffee shop last week. “We are going to have that sound in the classroom. I’m going to tell them no laptops and no iPads in the classroom, only manual typewriters. All their notes are going to have be done that way, and yes they are going to have to hand them in. They are going to be doing poetry, they are going to be doing prose.”

While all this might sound avant-garde and far afield from what many would consider traditional instruction for creative writing, it fits with Beaulieu’s own impressive canon of work as a writer and the theories that guide it. He has earned acclaim locally and internationally for cheerfully breaking rules when it comes to poetry. Even in Calgary, a hot spot for the avant-garde, Beaulieu’s work is aggressively experimental. Earlier this year, Wilfrid Laurier University Press released Please, No More Poetry, which found Mount Royal English instructor Kit Dobson putting together an anthology of Beaulieu’s work, which stretches back to the 1990s and includes nine books and countless pieces in magazines and chapbooks.

The title poem was written as a “manifesto” for a Vancouver magazine a few years back. It was meant to be a less-than-subtle nudge to his fellow bards, encouraging them to think more about expanding poetry than adhering to its old rules.

Among the withering observations contained within are “In poetry we celebrate mediocrity and ignore radicality” and “all bad poetry springs from genuine feelings” and “having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.”

“I want our community of writers and of poets to push this art form forward,” says Beaulieu. “I don’t see poetry as where we go to be told comforting stories or to have the same old words told back to us. I would like poetry to be challenging itself, to be pushing itself and to be finding new ways of expressing and using language in a way that is akin to experimental astrophysics, where scientists don’t just create work for consumption, they also try to theorize what comes next.”

Which should give some context to Beaulieu’s own body of work. In “That’s Not Writing”, another piece in the collection, Beaulieu puts together 50 proclamations that he found through a Google search that start with the titular term. “That’s not writing, that’s plumbing” is one, which was apparently what Samuel Beckett said about William Burroughs. But most of the work isn’t so on the nose in presenting Beaulieu’s ideas. Please, No More Poetry contains a number of concrete or shape poems, where the visual aspects are just as, if not more, important than the words. In his 2011 book How to Write, Beaulieu “plagiarized” 10 short stories from various sources; basically treating words the way a DJ samples music. A few years ago, he created a representation of an issue of the Calgary Herald without using any text. He used different colours to represent the type of news that was being reported, recreating 124 pages of multi-coloured blocks for a piece that has been exhibited worldwide.