fractal economies

$fractal economies book cover$

fractal economies

By Derek Beaulieu

2006

First Published

3.79

Average Rating

Number of Pages

2H55M

Audio Length

In fractal economies, derek beaulieu pushes the limits of poetry and poetics by grinding language through the mill of photocopiers, found material, collage, printmaking, frottage and Letraset—creating a new language for the genre. These “fractal economies,” or series of increasingly complex replications of forms through the repeated application of a fixed set of rules, challenge the status quo of poetry and of the politics of language itself, which is, with respect to any human script yet deciphered, capitalist in its very origin. Letters are freed from their “normal” behavior, machines are let loose to create on their own and the borders between poetry and artwork are blurred. In an intriguing and well-argued afterword, beaulieu also theorizes ways that concrete poetry—poetry that deals with language in a physical, material way—can move forward into the twenty-first century beyond the limitations of the page, the author and even the poem itself.

Avg Rating

3.79

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

29%

4 STARS

46%

3 STARS

2 STARS

11%

1 STARS

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Author

Derek Beaulieu

Author · 7 books

From wikipedia: Derek Alexander Beaulieu (born 1973) is a Canadian poet, publisher and anthologist. Beaulieu studied contemporary Canadian poetics at the University of Calgary. His work has appeared internationally in small press publications, magazines, and in visual art galleries. He has lectured on small press politics, arts funding and literary community in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Iceland. He works extensively around issues of community and poetics, and along those lines has edited (or co-edited) the magazines filling Station (1998–2001, 2004–present), dANDelion (2001–2004), and endNote (2000–2001). He founded housepress in 1997 from which he published small editions of poetry, prose and critical work until 2004. The housepress fonds are now located at Simon Fraser University. In 2005 he founded the small press no press. In 2005 he co-edited Shift & Switch: new Canadian poetry with Angela Rawlings and Jason Christie, a controversial anthology of radical new poetry which has been reviewed internationally. Beaulieu has shifted his focus in recent years to conceptual fiction, specifically visual translations/rewritings. His book Flatland consists of visual patterns based on the typography of Edwin Abbott Abbott's classic novel Flatland and his book Local Colour is a series of colour blocks based on the original text of Paul Auster's novella Ghosts. How to Write, a collection of conceptual prose, was published by Talonbooks in 2010. Beaulieu lives in Calgary, Alberta.