derek beaulieu

derek beaulieu es el autor de cinco libros de poesía, tres volúmenes de ficción conceptual, más de 150 “chapbooks” y un volumen de crítica, Seen of the Crime, el cual fue publicado por Snare Books, en 2011. Es el editor de las aclamadas mini-editoriales house press (1997–2004) y no press (2005–a la fecha). Beaulieu es el editor de poesía visual de UBUWeb y actualmente hace clases en Alberta College of Art + Design.

En el otoño de 2012, Bookthug publicó su edición crítica (co-editada con Gregory Betts) del volumen seminal de 1972 de comentario experimental RUSH what fuckan theory de Bill Bisset y en 2013 Wilfrid Laurier University Press estará publicando Writing Surfaces: The Selected Fiction of John Riddell (co-editado con Lori Emerson). El 2013 también traerá No more poetry, please: the selected poetry of derek beaulieu, editada por Kit Dobson que será publicada también por Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

derek beaulieu is the author of five books of poetry, three volumes of conceptual fiction, over 150 chapbooks and one volume of criticism, Seen of the Crime, which was published by Snare Books in 2011. He is the publisher of the acclaimed smallpresses housepress (1997–2004) and no press (2005–present). Beaulieu is the visual poetry editor at UBUWeb and teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design.

In Fall of 2012 Bookthug published his critical edition (co-edited with Gregory Betts) of bill bissett’s seminal 1972 volume of experimental commentary RUSH: what fuckan theory and in 2013 Wilfrid Laurier University Press is publishing his Writing Surfaces: The Selected Fiction of John Riddell (co-edited with Lori Emerson). 2013 also brings Wilfrid Laurier UP’s No more poetry, please: the selected poetry of derek beaulieu as edited by Kit Dobson.

Flattening Flatland by Derek Beaulieu

Flatland is a page-by-page response to E.A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a Victorian science-fiction satirical novel that posits a two-dimensional universe inhabited entirely by polygons.

For each page of Abbott’s novel I have traced, by hand, a map of each letter’s occurrence. Each line begins with a letter’s first occurrence—usually in the first line of text—and continues through the first appearance of that letter through-out the entire page of text. One line is traced for every letter of the alphabet. The result is a series of superimposed seismographic images that reduce the Flatland into a two-dimensional schematic reminiscent of EKG results or stock reports.

This project builds upon my previous work in concrete poetry, and a theorizing of a briefly non-signifying poetic, where the graphic mark of text becomes fore-grounded both as a rhizomatic map of possibility, and as a record of authorial movement.

Much as the Victorian novel A Human Document gave rise to Tom Phillips’ ongoing graphic interpretation A Humument, Flatland has resulted in a book-length interpretation of the graphic possibilities of a text without text.

Derrida, writing on Blanchot, asked “How can one text, assuming its unity, give or present another to be read, without touching it, without saying anything about it, practically without referring to it?” Each page of my graphically-realized Flatland is a completely unique, diagrammatic representation of the occurrences of letters. By reducing reading and language into a paragrammatical statistical analysis, content is subsumed into graphical representation of how language covers a page.

Flatland attempts—much like Simon Morris’ Re-writing Freud (2006), Vito Acconci’s “Transference” (1969) and other texts of conceptual literature—to flatten the plane of text.

http://derekbeaulieu.wordpress.com/