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Will Naomi Klein Read Derek Beaulieu's KERN?

4/7/2015

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Kern, by Derek Beaulieu. Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2015. 92 pp. $17.00.

“Kern is made by hand using dry transfer lettering without the use of computers,” Derek Beaulieu begins his “Author’s Note” afterword to this impressive collection of visual poems. Most poems are made by hand, of course, even those made by hands on typewriter or computer keyboards. It’s not so much the hand, however, that Beaulieu seems concerned with here – disabled artists are known to draw with their feet or mouths, and hands are still used to turn on most smartphones and other computers – as it is the non-use of computers. Beaulieu follows the avant-garde tradition here of re-purposing commercial technologies that were abandoned before their full artistic potential could be explored. Usually artists have been attracted to commerce’s cast off technologies such as the letter press and the mimeograph because they’ve been inexpensive to acquire. That’s not necessarily the case here. In fact the production of Les Figues’ elegant 8" x 8" edition of Beaulieu’s poems appears unsurprisingly indebted to computers, right down the barcode.

The most widely known brand name of dry transfer lettering during the 1960s and 70s was Letraset, which bpNichol used in some of his early Ganglia books, and which I used on each page of the first four issues of Open Letter in 1965-1967. Beaulieu writes here that it was then “a specialized tool with an expensive price tag”; I don’t recall that. It was an inexpensive tool by contrast to typesetting, and could be easily combined with the other then developing technologies of offset printing, which I used, and xeroxing, which Nichol used, to make multiple



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Derek Beaulieu Deplores 'Hopelessly' 'Tired' & Irrelevant Poetry

1/8/2015

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transcend   transcribe   transfigure   transform   transgress, by Derek Beaulieu. Ottawa: above/ground, 2014. 36 pp.

If Derek Beaulieu fans (myself included) have a sense of deja vu as they begin this chapbook-prosepoem-essay-manifesto, it’s because its first page or so expands statements he made in the last pages of his interview by Lori Emerson in his 2013 selected poems, Please, No More Poetry.

Those pages left Beaulieu with a few things to sort out and clarify, particularly the passage


                the “golden arches,” the Nike “swoosh” and the Dell logo best represent the
                descendants of the modernist poem. Poet Lew Welsh famously wrote the
                ubiquitous Raid slogan “Raid kills bugs dead" as a copywriter at Foote Cone
                and Belding in 1966. Vanessa Place argues, “we are in an age that  understands
                corporations are people too and poetry is the stuff of placards. And vice versa."
                Like logos for the corporate sponsors of Jorge Luis Borges’ library, my concrete
                poems use the particles of language to represent and promote goods and
                corporations just out of reach.


Among those things this passage left suspended was the question of whether Beaulieu likes modernist poems. And what poems does he consider modernist? Does he know that the 'famous' story that claims that Lew Welch wrote the Raid 'poem' is undocumented, and at best an urban legend? Should he perhaps, like Margaret Atwood several decades ago, incorporate himself? Has he noticed that the 1942 “Loose lips sink ships,” created by the War Advertisers Council, is a modernist precursor of the Raid poem and like it had a corporate author? Does he think Lew Welch should have stayed in advertising? I am of course pulling Derek’s chain, but I do wish that he had undertaken in that interview to be as careful on some of these points as he has been in creating his artwork.

One change Beaulieu makes to this passage in his new book – seemingly following both Cummings and the once continually revising Earle Birney – is to remove all capital letters and to replace all his punctuation with spaces. Another – perhaps following Charles Olson’s use of large caps – is to use boldface for emphasis, thus overall making his text appear more ‘poetic’ than academic. (So much for “no more poetry,” eh, Derek?) Another is to raise the intensity of



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Speech on Poetry Climate Change #kennethgoldsmith #obama #derekbeaulieu

6/27/2013

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[There were amusingly lyric moments in Barack Obama’s marginally encouraging speech this Tuesday on climate change. They led me to wonder what he might have said had he been concerned about poetry climate change. ]

Fellow citizens – remember that man in the moon
looking over at Earth, beautiful; breathtaking;
a glowing marble of blue oceans. But even he can now see
that poetry has been changing
in ways that will have profound impacts on all human poets.

12 of the longest poems in the history of our language
have been written in the past century. Last year
the automated re-use of words in some areas of poetry
reached record highs and the pool
of words considered unpoetic shrank to the smallest size on record
faster than most sociologists had predicted. These are facts.

Now we know that no single poem event is caused solely by climate change.
Haiku, epigrams, and sapphics, they go back to ancient times.
But we also know that in a world where there’s more words being used
than there used to be, all language events are affected by a planet ever
more robotic and garrulous. The fact that most of our poetry books
are a half-inch thinner than a century ago
didn’t cause books with titles like The Alphabet, Draft , Footnotes, Day
or Metropolis, but it certainly contributed to
to the shrinking that left large parts of our mightiest canon
feeling small and overshadowed.

The potential impacts go far beyond falling word levels. Here at home
2012 was the most silent year in our history. The plains were parched
by the longest sentence drought in its memory. Visual poems scorched
an area larger than Leaves of Grass. Only last week a conceptual poet
in nearby Alberta published a whole book made of 90s.

As a resident, as a father, and as a Poet I’m here to say we need to act.

My plan begins by cutting language pollution


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Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu #derekbeaulieu #alpurdy #bpNichol

6/24/2013

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Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu, edited and introduced by Kit Dobson, is a new release in Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s poetry series and, despite the title, there will probably be others in the series. The book is a novel venture for WLUP. Most of the series has presented small collections by long-serving and relatively well known Canadian writers. beaulieu, who has edited the very small presses No Press and housepress, is well known mostly among other small press poets.

There is probably no prize for identifying the title and subtitle as a curiosity-raising paradox. What is this? – a book of poetry that wants to be last book of poetry? – that wants no competitors to follow it? (Good luck!) Or is the “poetry” of the subtitle different from the “poetry” of the title? If so, surely the press could have given the reader a little typographical hint, perhaps putting the second “poetry” in all lower case, or in quotation marks?  Dobson’s introduction, however, indeed indicates that the two “poetry” words are different, quoting beaulieu on his being a poet who is “concerned with exploring forms that move away from the ‘the poem as finely wrought epiphanic moment of personal reflection,’” and who “‘abandons narrative intention in favour of compositional intention.’” He quotes beaulieu again as having asserted that “poetry is no longer the beautiful expression of emotive truths; it is the archaeological arrangement of the remains of an ancient civilization.”

So the “no more poetry” that the title wants to see no more of is the poetry that attempts “the beautiful expression of emotive truths,” that aspires to “a finely wrought epiphanic moment of personal reflection” or to a vivid narrative of event or reflection.  In such theoretical statements beaulieu has not been wary of binary oppositions – “narrative intention” is undesirable, “compositional intention” desirable; “beautiful expression of emotive truths” is undesirable, “archaeological rearrangement” desirable. Through these binaries beaulieu is joining the attack on the lyric poem that began back at least as far back as the 1950s with Olson’s critique of the “private-soul-at-any-public-wall” and Duncan’s scathing’s denunciations of poets who wrote poems in order to publicize themselves and aggrandize their careers. Paradoxically, of course, outrageous binary oppositions can help build a poet’s career, as in Irving Layton’s amusingly


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    Author

    FRANK DAVEY: Poet, former Coach House Press editor, co-founder of TISH newsletter in 1961, co-founder of e-mag Swift Current in 1984, editor of poetics journal Open Letter, 'author' of Bardy Google in 2010 (Talonbooks), author of the tell-much biography of bpNichol, aka bpNichol in 2012 (ECW), and author of the recently published poetry collection Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions (Mansfield). He has two other websites: a personal one at FrankDavey.net and one (co-managed with David Rosenberg) focused on poet bpNichol at  akabpNichol.net -- have a look!

    Postal Address: Books for review or other mail may be sent to FD at OPEN LETTER, 102 Oak Street, Strathroy, ON N7G 3K3, Canada

    -Bio/interview by 'Open Book'
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