Archives for posts with tag: concrete poetry

My good friend and publisher Joakim Norling has just posted the below on social media:

Timglaset Editions to cease publishing. After long deliberation I have decided to put Timglaset to rest. The press has been under a lot of pressure since the recession in 2022-23. Manufacturing and shipping costs have risen sharply and sales of the books have unfortunately taken a dive. For a press which has always worked with tight margins and relied on unpaid work and financial support from my own pockets this development has been disturbing. About a month ago it all came to a point where continuing with the press, in its present form, became impossible, when my webshop platform announced its intention to raise prices with 110%. I simply cannot pay the new fee, which means that Timglaset will be without an online selling platform April 1st. So what will happen now? Timglaset will stop publishing new books. I will establish a simple new website with a list of available books, which will allow those who still have an interest to order from the backlist. Up until April 1st the current webshop will be active and there will be a 30% discount on all orders. Just apply the coupon code GOODBYE at checkout. Sincerely, Joakim Norling, publisher.
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and as I wrote Joakim via email:
It’s been clear over the last year or so that things with shifting and changing at Timglaset — the level of news, of posts, of general gossip, and promotion had shifted — but I remained hopeful that the inevitable wouldn’t happen. I completely understand and respect Joakim’s decision to close Timglaset down in its current form; the realities of small and independent publishing is incredibly difficult — and I know that this decision could not have been easy. The support that Joakim and Timglaset has offered me over the years and through many publications has been invaluable; my writing has become weirder and stronger, more confident and clearer-minded, due to his influence, his publishing support, and his friendship. I wish the best for Joakim and for his publishing; there are few presses in the world with the high quality backlist and mandate that he has created. I’m happy to have been a small part of his press. Thank you Joakim for the hours, the conversations, the tireless efforts, the financial investment — for the optimism and willingness to invest where others feared to tread; for being proprietor of one of the world’s most courageous presses. Thank you for publishing me, for inviting and hosting me in Malmö, for meeting me in London, and for so so much more…and thank you for extending that same generosity to so many other authors.

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You should read the PDF of Joakim Norling’s June 2023 statement on Timglaset’s mandate, which I published as a chapbook through No Press.

Timglaset Editions published 5 titles of mine over the years:

SILENCE: LECTURES AND WRITINGS and 150 (for Andy) (both of which remain available for order, use the code GOODBYE for 30% off) and On Syntax (which is out of print but is available as a free PDF), ABC: An Abecedarium (which is available as a free PDF) and isostatisk landhöjning.

My involvement with Timglaset extended beyond simply being published by them: I also contributed a contextualizing essay to Joe Devlin’s Marginalia Drawings, an image to Timglaset magazine #4, and back cover blurbs for Danni Storm’s Herbarium, Andrew Brezna’s Automatic Souls, Catherine Vidler’s Lost Sonnets, and Joakim kindly translated my work as Snälla, inte mer poesi. I also proofread Fernando Aguiar’s Poems without Words, and Amanda Earl’s Judith: Women making visual poetry.

Timglaset has published some astonishingly fabulous books over the years, including, but hardly limited to, Kate Siklosi’s Leavings, Gary Barwin’s Quantum Typography, Sacha Archer’s cellsea and Mother’s Milk, Fernando Aguiar’s Poems without Words, Hartmut Abendschein’s Asemic Walks, and Amanda Earl’s edited volume Judith: Women making visual poetry … and so many more.

vexations-3-77The third of a projected 10 volumes, VEXATIONS BOOK 3: Lexmark XM5163 decomposes the score of Erik Satie’s masterpiece through repeated photocopy degeneration. Beaulieu’s VEXATIONS moves writing towards “furniture music.”

Each volume uses a different photocopier to degenerate Satie’s score – with startlingly unique results. Taken as a 10-book suite, the completed project will present 840 variations (84 variations per book over 10 books)

Purchase a copy here (limited edition of 26 copies; 176 pages $26 + shipping)

Download a free PDF here

Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif,

il sera bon de se préparer au préalable,

et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses

—Erik Satie

(“In order to play the theme 840 times in succession,

it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand,

and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities”)

—Erik Satie

img_2597 img_2598 img_2617 img_2610 img_2615 img_2609I am honoured that one of my visual poems has been spray-painted in the plaza next to Calgary’s Pages Books!

 

Spray-painted in special bio-degradable ink, this stencil will only be visible when it rains (let’s hope for a rainy autumn), the rest of the time it will be unapparent underfoot. The YYC LITERARY SIDEWALKS initiative, funded and spearheaded by Rosemary Griebel at the Calgary Public Library and Shelley Youngblut at Wordfest will eventually bring 11 different stenciled literary moments to Calgary’s streets …

pages_loading_1of2No Press is proud to announce the publication of

Pages Loading by Eric Schmaltz

Published in a limited edition of 40 copies (only 20 of which are for sale), Pages Loading is available for $2.00 including domestic postage (+ $1 non-Canadian postage). To order please email derek beaulieu.

Pages Loading explores the transient & frequent instances of textual transmutation in digital reading environments. As code & meta-data become vernacular, fugitive obfuscation manifests as blurry, pixelated, and nebulous digital pages. Pages Loading captures these interstitial moments, observing the commonplace linguistic disruption of the e-reader interface.

Eric Schmaltz is an experimental poet living in Toronto.

Ontario’s Chris Turnbull has included one of my concrete poems in her GROVE PROJECT whereby poems are placed in natural environments2014-03-25 21.03.28 2014-03-25 21.15.17 2014-03-25 21.17.39 2014-03-25 21.23.11 2014-05-03 19.18.58 2014-05-03 19.25.57

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

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

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

beaulieu-emersonCounterpath 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.

_225x300_thekakofonie005The 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.