German typography magazine Slanted features a piece of mine in their discussion of the typographic grotesque. They commissioned me to create a Helvetica-based response to the Sex Pistol’s “Something Else” which can be found on page 87 of #14 of Slanted, available in print and online here.
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The Calgary Herald takes an interest in my work in a piece entitled “alt.poet: Derek Beaulieu thinks outside the linguistic box“
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):
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!
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.
For the week of July 10-16 2011, I am teaching in Bragg Creek as part of the Wordsworth Literary Camp (aimed at 15-19 year olds). I’ll be teaching “Thriving under pressure” in which students will discuss how poets and fiction writers have found means of making language flourish under the most rigorous of restrictions; hone your voice through exercises related to some of the most unusual contemporary books out there: narrative without words, poems without letters, throat-singing and beat-boxing, missing vowels, restricted word-counts, visual poetry, sound poetry — all of these subjects are fodder for a class which will challenge how you see writing and what it means to be a writer.
I’m teaching English 364 – “Poetry Writing I” at the University of Calgary for the 2011/12 academic year. More information about the course can be found here.
I have spent the last week in Manchester and Bury preparing for the 3rd bi-annual Text Festival at the Bury Art Gallery. Curator and writer Tony Trehy has pulled out all the stops for what he claims will be the final iteration of the internationally acclaimed festival (barring any potential touring exhibitions currently in negotiation).
The festival includes participants from around the globe, gathered in a variety of exhibition spaces both within the Bury Art Gallery and throughout Bury. I won’t discuss every artwork in the exhibition but there are highlights (including Trehy’s curation) which deserve special comment.
The Festival’s central exhibition opens with a brief arrangement of contemporary Japanese visual poetry from the collection of Josef Lischinger. Lischinger is the world’s premiere collector of Asian visual poetry and is the author of Japanese Visual Poetry II (Ritter Verlag). Viewers access visual poetry through a discussion of the graphic and artistic possibilities of Japanese ideograms that prompts them to approach the exhibition with a consideration of both the physical appearance of language and its semantic content. The exhibition then presents a series of silkscreen prints by Eugen Gomringer which superimpose English vowels over Japanese characters, transitioning the gallery discussion from ideograms into a vocabulary of English characters, superimposition and the possibilities of the graphicism of text.
Wonder Room - Text Festival
The initial salon is the “Wonder Room” which includes an array of international visual poems. The exhibition is unconventionally hung (to say the least) with pieces arranged at both floor and ceiling level and—most controversially—overlapping each other. Meant to overwhelm the viewer with the cacophony of international directions in visual poetics (and give the viewer a crash course for the typographically unorthodox), the room also reveals a major issue in contemporary visual poetry: visual poetry today suffers from a lack of scale and a lack of editorial acumen. Trehy was inundated with digital submissions that did not consider the size of reproduction beyond the size of the computer screen. Poets submitted their work without digitally preparing it for printing and often omitted printing directions, which left the curator with the task of determining the printing threshold as the point at which the artwork became unacceptably pixellated. Too many visual poets are myopic in their output. They compose work on the screen without considering the size or scale of their final product and the work suffers from that lack of foresight. Poets should compose with an eye for both the page and the gallery, for both the reader and the viewer. A central concern in visual poetry is the materiality of language; this aesthetic concern must be coupled with an eye for the materiality of the artwork itself.
Christian Bok - The Xenotext
From the problematic din of the “Wonder Rooms,” the Text Festival presents three salons of work that more successfully investigates the poetic possibilities of the gallery. Christian Bök’s Xenotext Project presents a 7000-piece table-top maquette of the atomic structure of the poem written for implantation in the DNA of the microscopic extremophile Deinococcus radiodurans. The piece is augmented by the DNA poem (and the RNA reply), and is an exceptional example of the possibilities of visual poetry when it challenges the restrictions of the page.
Pavel Buchler - Studio Schwitters
Another highlight of the exhibition is Pavel Büchler’s “Studio Schwitters.” This monumental installation consists of dozens of antiquated military PA megaphones programmed to perform Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonata at their lowest collective volume. The megaphones are swerved from the Orwellian broadcast of state-sponsored directives to transmission of a text-to-speech computerized reproduction of Schwitter’s epic sound poem. Büchler has recently created an installation piece for a gallery in London that uses decommissioned speakers from the world’s largest stadium (the 220,000 seat Strahov Stadium in Prague) to broadcast the sound of a single bumblebee’s flight. Büchler eschews audio fidelity (which is beyond the capabilities of such monstrous antiquated equipment) in favour of a subtle and delicate misappropriation of technology in the service of ephemeral pastoral beauty.
Shezad Dawood’s work was also an under-discussed highlight of the exhibition. Ron Silliman used neon to construct the sentence “Poetry has been Bury, Bury good to me” —which will be on permanent exhibition in the Bury Tram Station—a construction that reflects poorly on his previous work by trading on his avant-garde reputation to submit a terrible pun. Dawood’s neon pieces, on the other hand, are a series of plinths that represent the epithets attached to Allah’s name in the Koran. On display was “The Majestic” which entwines the eponymous phrase in neon Arabic into the thorned branches of sage bush tumbleweed. The sage bush is native to Texas (not unlike a previous US president), and the epithet is barely readable though the bush’s branched confusion.
Shezad Dawood - The Majestic
While many of those same poets who submitted work digitally without an eye for the scale and dimensions of the gallery walls also sent work in such vast numbers that they overwhelmed the curator and his staff. Trehy categorizes this impulse as “the urge to over-production” but I believe is indicative of visual poets lacking both confidence and a critical vocabulary for their chosen métier. This lack of criticality not only restricts the discourse around visual poetry but also prevents visual poetry from successfully negotiating the transition into gallery exhibitions. Christian Bök on the Harriet blog anticipates the effect the 2011 Text Festival will have on the audience. I am just as curious to see what the effect will be on the poets themselves.
I plan to continue the post with a discussion of the Text Festival’s performances and some of the other events and conversations I had in Manchester and Bury and later in York and Coxwold…
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