iam : Derek Beaulieu

Derek Beaulieu 's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions , featuring an Afterword by Marjorie Perloff (110 pp, 2007, ISBN 978-0-9553092-5-0). £12.50

215mm x 140mm

"As the Greenbergian modernists proclaimed the flatness of the canvas, so Derek Beaulieu reduces the page to a flat plane. The result is a new kind of flatness-call it non-illusionistic literature-a depthless fiction, one where image and narrative is reduced to line and shadow. In the great tradition of Picabia, Beaulieu creates a perfect work of mechanical writing with one foot in the concrete poetic past and another in the flat screen future."
-Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Day & Founding Editor of UBUweb

Gregory Betts reads Derek Beaulieu [read on his blog]. Beaulieu has produced an unreadable book. This raises, to my mind, two immediate questions. First, why produce a book that is unreadable? Second, what makes it unreadable? Well, the latter is the easy question: there are no words to read... [...con't]

[Review written on his blog, link opens in a new window]

(appeared in MATRIX #80, summer 2008 issue, page 61)

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
by derek beaulieu
afterword by Marjorie Perloff
Read by Jesse Ferguson

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is conceptual literature for the hardcore visual poetry aficionado. As with most good conceptual work, it’s not likely to end up in the hands of the guy sitting next to you on the bus, but it will register in small coteries of informed readers. This book consists of roughly one hundred pages of “superimposed seismographic images,” which plot the physical occurrence of letters on the pages of a source text. The source here is Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 science fiction novella of the same title, in which anthropomorphised polygons inhabit a two-dimensional world.

Purists in visual poetry demand that each piece stand on its own — without glosses, without biographical information about the author, or even without a title. beaulieu’s graphical work here passes the test. His stark black and white images are always on the verge of mimesis — of suggesting spider’s legs, architectural forms, saw blades, EKGs, maps of constellations, etc., but they shirk any simple one-to-one signification. It is also significant that he has plotted these intricate graphs by hand, therefore responding to Abbott’s typed text with that imperfect apparatus, the human body. This yields slight yet noticeable imperfections, signs that the author has been here.

Yet, though no two poems are identical, the average consumer of visual poetry would likely be satisfied with but a few of these — they appear quite repetitive. To answer this charge, we appeal to the various paratexts. In the spring 2007 issue of Qwerty magazine beaulieu explained his rationale for this project, stating his desire to subsume Abbott’s content into a “graphical representation of how language covers a page.” In layman’s terms, beaulieu, like many visual poets before him, exploits the printed page to interrogate the way we consume and are defined by the written word. To do this, he translates Abbot’s entire text into a non-textual, non-semantic language of peaks and valleys. For some readers, then, the concept behind beaulieu’s Flatland will be more interesting than the poems themselves, but such is often the plight of innovative literary work.