Visual poet Derek Beaulieu not only writes and recites words, he makes art from them.
The author of four books of poetry and two volumes of conceptual fiction, Beaulieu has generated some of the most radical and challenging contemporary writing in Canada.
The Calgary-based artist speaks at Gallery Vertigo today in an event sponsored by the Vernon artist-run gallery, Okanagan College, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Beaulieu is best known for his intentionally unreadable word poems.
He works with Letraset — a dry-transfer lettering that’s rubbed onto a paper’s surface –– entirely by hand to create his word art.
He recently unveiled a new letter poem, which is now on display in the window of a Calgary bookstore.
“As a child, I was always reading,” Beaulieu told Lynda Sea in Calgary’s Avenue Magazine. “I was definitely influenced by Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra! There are some very strange graphic Seussian symbols with curlicue letters that sort of remind us of text. And I read comic books continuously, because there’s this interplay between text and pictures.”
One of Beaulieu’s largest and most complex pieces is an 18-by-53-inch print with several thousand characters, which took him four months to complete.
Based on French artist Blaise Cendrars’ book, Prose of the Trans-Siberian, the piece combines abstract art and prose on 150 copies of paper to equal the height of the Calgary Tower.
An educator, who works for the Calgary board of education and at Mount Royal University, Beaulieu currently runs the small independent press, No Press.
He has also been the editor and publisher of Housepress and Dandelion, and has spoken and written on poetics internationally.
Beaulieu gives a literary reading at Vertigo, #1-3001 31st. St., today at 7 p.m. Admission is free.
