Derek Beaulieu Libri

Typography meets poetry at a Pink Floyd laser-light show In Surface Tension, poetry is liquified. 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.

Quill pen, linotype, computer: does how you write affect what you write? This book 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.

Exploring the innovative fusion of styles, this short fiction collection showcases a unique approach to writing that emphasizes sampling, borrowing, and cutting-and-pasting techniques. It presents a literary mash-up that challenges traditional narratives, inviting readers into a dynamic interplay of voices and forms. Each story serves as a testament to the evolving nature of literature in the modern age.

Pushing the boundaries of poetry and poetics, the author confronts conventional norms and explores the politics of language. This work invites readers to reconsider established literary forms and engage with the innovative use of language, making it a thought-provoking contribution to contemporary poetry.

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.

Tiré du site Interne de Jean Boîte éd.: "Derek Beaulieu's a, A Novel is an erasure-based translative response to Andy Warhol's eponymous novel. Beaulieu carefully erases all of the text on each page of the original work, leaving only the punctuation marks, typists' insertions and onomatopoeic words. The resultant text is a novelistic ballet mécanique, a visual orchestration of the traffic signals and street noise of 1960's New York City. This visually powerful half score/half novel highlights the musicality of non-narrative sounds embedded within conversation. Published in December 1968, Andy Warhol's a, A Novel consists solely of the transcribed conversations of Factory denizen Ondine (Robert Olivo). Ondine's amphetamine-addled conversations were captured on audiotape as he haunted the Factory, hailed cabs to late-night parties and traded gossip with Warhol and his coterie. The tapes were roughly transcribed by a small group of high school students. Rife with typographic errors, censored sections, and a chorus of voices, the 451 pages of transcription became, unedited, "a new kind of pop artefact". These pages emphasize transcription over narration, hazard over composition. In his book, Derek Beaulieu offers a radical displacement of Andy Warhol's work. He erases the novel's speaking characters - members of the mid 1960's New York avant-garde - and preserves only the musicality of their conversations. Beaulieu perfectly provides a tangible example of Theodor Adorno's theory elaborated in his essay Punctuation Marks, in which he argues that punctuation marks are the "traffic signals" of literature and that there is "no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks". This visual poetry is accompanied by an essay by Gilda Williams, "Breaking Up is Hard to Do. Men, Women, and Punctuation in Warhol's Novel a". Her deep knowledge of both Andy Warhol's work and the history of contemporary art explores the complicated history of the original novel and highlights the urgent and precise spirit of Derek Beaulieu's work - the work of an artist who situates Uncreative Writing at the core of contemporary literature and artistic labour."