How to Write is a perverse Coles Notes: a paradigm of prosody where writing as sampling, borrowing, cutting-and-pasting and mash-up meets literature. This collection of conceptual short ?ction takes inspiration from Lautréamont’s decree that plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.”Already early in the twentieth century, the modernist Ezra Pound asserted that poets should make it new,” and of course by it” he meant the tradition”: the materiality of pre-existent writing. The assertion is by no means original, much less post-modern: John Donne, for example, argued centuries ago that all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”How to Write is an instruction manual for the demise of ownership. A multitudinous dialogue of writers and subjects, words and contexts, it unleashes a cacophony of voices where authors don’t own their words, they merely rent them from other authors. Containing ten pieces of conceptual prose ranging from the purely appropriated through the entirely recomposed, and covering a range of texts from the anonymous to the famous, it includes samplings from, among many others: Lawrence Sterne; Agatha Christie; Bob Kane; Roy Lichtenstein; and every piece of text within one block of the author’s home. Its title story is an exhaustive record of every incidence of the words write” or writes” in forty different English-language texts picked aesthetically to represent a disparate number of genres.With How to Write, beaulieu suggests writers and artists would be better served to make it reframed, make it borrowed, make it re-contextualized.” By recasting the canon with cut-up directions for successful writing, catalogues of events, and lists of vocabulary, he gleefully illustrates Picasso’s dictum that Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”

How to Write

Literature & Fiction

Beaulieu, Derek

History & Criticism

Talonbooks

Poetry. Art. With CHAINS, derek beaulieu once again turns his attention to how "language regards itself, stalks itself, begins, slowly, to eat itself" (Canadian Literature) in a series of graceful abstractions made entirely from antiquated dry-transfer lettering. In chains, letters gather in elegant arrangements, architectural constructions and sinews of meaning. Derek Bealieu is the author of 4 books of poetry and conceptual writing. In 2005 he coauthored, with Gary Barwin, fragments from the frag pool: haiku after basho, a book of playful translations. In 2006 he co-edited Shift & Switch: new Canadian poetry to wide acclaim. Alberta Views recently referred to Beaulieu as a "mad scientist of visual poetry", and FFWD referred to his 2006 volume fractal economies as having "the potential to be like Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which taps the veins of jazz for many listeners and musicians. Never read a book of concrete poetry before? This might be the one to hook you."

Chains

Poetry

Paper Kite Press

Quill pen, linotype, computer: does how you write affect what you write? In with wax, derek beaulieu spurns the sentence and woos the phrase, the image and the language of printing, weaving fragments together to address the question of how publishing and printing affect writing.
The result is a series of poems – marvellous hybrids of visual, Language and lyrical poetry – that are sure to impress.

with wax

Coach House Books

Typography meets poetry at a Pink Floyd laser-light show In Surface Tension, poetry is liquefied. Flowing away from meaning, letters and words gather and pool into puddles of poetry; street signs and logos reflected in the oily sheen of polluted gutters of rainwater. Like a funhouse mirror reflecting the language that surrounds us, the pages drip over the margins, suggesting that Madge was right, we are "soaking in it!" Surface Tension updates visual poetry for our post-pandemic age, asking us rethink the verbiage around us, to imagine letters as images instead of text, to find meaning in their beautiful shapes as Beaulieu stretches, torques, slides, blurs, and melts them into Dali-esque collages. "The striking compositions you'll find in&nbsp;Surface Tension&nbsp;are being presented sequentially in book form, yet that they wouldn't be out of place hanging on the wall goes without saying. Beaulieu swerves Gomringer when writing that 'Readibility is the key: like a logo, a poem should be instantly recognizable...' yet, to this reader, these works merit sustained and enthusiastic viewing precisely because they teeter on the edge of legibility. The kinetic, glitchy quality of their 'alphabetic strangeness' keeps them unrecognizable as poems and, here, 'that is poetry as I need it,' to quote Cage. Think of them as anti-advertisings selling you nothing but bountiful manifestations of the irreducible plasticity of numbers, punctuation marks, and letter forms. No logos." - Mónica de la Torre, Madelon Leventhal Rand Endowed Chair in Literature, Brooklyn College; co-editor of&nbsp;Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-1979 "With his distinctive visual palindromes and angled axes of symmetry, Derek Beaulieu has developed a signature mastery of Letraset, leveraging the twentieth-century technology as a vehicle for bring concrete poetry into the twenty-first century. With&nbsp;Surface Tension, Beaulieu takes the possibilities of that new idiom even further, unsettling the fixity his symmetries once reinforced and dislodging the set in Letraset as poems distort in fun-house-mirror swerves, sag as if under their own weight, pool and smear in the liquid logic of heated ink, or swoop and blur as if in motion. In the process, these poems make visible the filmic potential of the photocopier, the facture of abraded transfers from brittling stock, and the three-dimensional substrate of the page with its flexible bends in curving space. These are thus poems in part about their own modes of production. They are beautiful products of a self-aware and intelligent process." - Craig Dworkin, author of&nbsp;Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality "'When most of the language we consume is non-poetic, should poetry not attempt to poetically intervene within these spaces that are not traditionally poetic?' The answer to Derek Beaulieu's question, put forward in his beautiful essay, is surely yes: the ten brilliantly adventurous visual poems in his&nbsp;Surface Tension&nbsp;make a startling case for his fascinating Letraset/photocopier inventions. Beaulieu's compositions originate in a place of clean design and logical narrative; soon, as in a dream, they open up, ushering in what he calls 'a poetry of difference, chance, eruption.' Marcel Duchamp would have called it the poetry of the infrathin: watch 'Simple Symmetry' or 'Dendrochronology' open up and come alive in their minutely evolving new spaces. This is quite simply an enchanting book - a book producing new pleasures with each turn of the page." - Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, Stanford University

Surface Tension

Since the beginning of his poetic career in the 1990s, derek beaulieu has created works that have challenged readers to understand in new ways the possibilities of poetry. With nine books currently to his credit, and many works appearing in chapbooks, broadsides, and magazines, beaulieu continues to push experimental poetry, both in Canada and internationally, in new directions. Please, No More Poetry is the first selected works of derek beaulieu. As the publisher of first housepress and, more recently, No Press, beaulieu has continually highlighted the possibilities for experimental work in a variety of writing communities. His own work can be classified as visual poetry, as concrete poetry, as conceptual work, and beyond. His work is not to be read in any traditional sense, as it challenges the very idea of reading; rather, it may be understood as a practice that forces readers to reconsider what they think they know. As beaulieu continues to push himself in new directions, readers will appreciate the work that he has created to date, much of which has become unavailable in Canada. With an introduction by Kit Dobson and an interview with derek beaulieu by Lori Emerson as an afterword, Please, No More Poetry offers readers an opportunity to gain access to a complex experimental poetic practice through thirty-five selected representative works.

Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (Laurier Poetry, 19)

Dobson, Kit

Wilfrid Laurier University Press