Typography meets poetry at a Pink Floyd laser-light show
In Surface Tension, poetry is liquefied. Flowing away from meaning,
letters and words gather and pool into puddles of poetry; street signs
and logos reflected in the oily sheen of polluted gutters of rainwater.
Like a funhouse mirror reflecting the language that surrounds us, the
pages drip over the margins, suggesting that Madge was right, we are
"soaking in it!"
Surface Tension updates visual poetry for our post-pandemic age,
asking us rethink the verbiage around us, to imagine letters as images
instead of text, to find meaning in their beautiful shapes as Beaulieu
stretches, torques, slides, blurs, and melts them into Dali-esque
collages.
"The striking compositions you'll find in Surface Tension are being
presented sequentially in book form, yet that they wouldn't be out of
place hanging on the wall goes without saying. Beaulieu swerves
Gomringer when writing that 'Readibility is the key: like a logo, a poem
should be instantly recognizable...' yet, to this reader, these works
merit sustained and enthusiastic viewing precisely because they teeter
on the edge of legibility. The kinetic, glitchy quality of their
'alphabetic strangeness' keeps them unrecognizable as poems and, here,
'that is poetry as I need it, ' to quote Cage. Think of them as
anti-advertisings selling you nothing but bountiful manifestations of
the irreducible plasticity of numbers, punctuation marks, and letter
forms. No logos." - Mónica de la Torre, Madelon Leventhal Rand Endowed
Chair in Literature, Brooklyn College; co-editor of Women in Concrete
Poetry 1959-1979
"With his distinctive visual palindromes and angled axes of symmetry,
Derek Beaulieu has developed a signature mastery of Letraset, leveraging
the twentieth-century technology as a vehicle for bring concrete poetry
into the twenty-first century. With Surface Tension, Beaulieu takes
the possibilities of that new idiom even further, unsettling the fixity
his symmetries once reinforced and dislodging the set in Letraset as
poems distort in fun-house-mirror swerves, sag as if under their own
weight, pool and smear in the liquid logic of heated ink, or swoop and
blur as if in motion. In the process, these poems make visible the
filmic potential of the photocopier, the facture of abraded transfers
from brittling stock, and the three-dimensional substrate of the page
with its flexible bends in curving space. These are thus poems in part
about their own modes of production. They are beautiful products of a
self-aware and intelligent process." - Craig Dworkin, author of Radium
of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality
"'When most of the language we consume is non-poetic, should poetry not
attempt to poetically intervene within these spaces that are not
traditionally poetic?' The answer to Derek Beaulieu's question, put
forward in his beautiful essay, is surely yes: the ten brilliantly
adventurous visual poems in his Surface Tension make a startling case
for his fascinating Letraset/photocopier inventions. Beaulieu's
compositions originate in a place of clean design and logical narrative;
soon, as in a dream, they open up, ushering in what he calls 'a poetry
of difference, chance, eruption.' Marcel Duchamp would have called it
the poetry of the infrathin: watch 'Simple Symmetry' or
'Dendrochronology' open up and come alive in their minutely evolving new
spaces. This is quite simply an enchanting book - a book producing new
pleasures with each turn of the page." - Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham
Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, Stanford University
