Derek Beaulieu
Derek Beaulieu
Biography
Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty collections of poetry, prose, and criticism, including two volumes of his selected work, Please, No More Poetry (2013) and Konzeptuelle Arbeiten (2017). His most recent volume of fiction, a, A Novel, was published by France’s Jean Boîte Editions, his most recent volume of poetry, Lens Flare, was published by UK’s Guillemot Press. Beaulieu has exhibited his visual work across Canada, the United States, and Europe and has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students. Derek Beaulieu holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University and is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
He can be found online at https://derekbeaulieu.ca
Poetics Statement
“Since 1997 I have been dedicated to the writing, editing, discussion and dissemination of Canadian and international poetry. What began as a means of having interesting conversations with like-minded people and to be part of community has become … exactly that. 24 years later and I still believe in small press publishing (I founded housepress in 1997 and no press in 2004, having now published over 650 titles by hundreds of poets from around the world), dissemination (I post all of my publication as free downloadable PDFs on my website), editing (I have edited anthologies and collections of both emerging and established Canadian poets, often returning major works back to print) and mentorship (having received multiple teaching awards locally and nationally).
I believe it the role of all poets to not only write, but to mentor, support, publish and encourage other writers. Margaret Avison said that “the best response to a poem is another poem” and I couldn’t agree more: poets have the chance to build a conversation in writing, a means of exploring what writing can be through ongoing discourse and the creation of opportunity.
To write poetry is to explore the limitations of our thinking, to find ways of expressing the ineffable using a limited tool: the alphabet. We search for a language of expression always at the edge of our own grasp, just beyond the ends of our fingertips. My poetry moves across form—from lyric memoir in Extispicium (Proper Tales 2019), to visual poetry in Kern (Les Figues, 2014); from exploring the history of publishing in with wax (Coach House Books, 2003) to the graphic possibilities of evoking 1970s wallpaper in Lens Flare (cowritten with Rhys Farrell; Guillemot Press, 2021). Poetry is a means of spelunking the caves of potential, the caverns of possibility of the huge spaces of what can be across meaning, across graphicism, across emotion, and thinking. I invite readers (for what are writers but readers and responders, wishing our way into conversation?) to witness my thinking, my exploration through publication. As I said, I post all my work online for free to ensure complete open access, I publish others, I mentor and critique, all as a means of exploring poetry together, in abundance.”
