Derek Beaulieu, Do It Wrong

To write poetry is to make an active choice to assert yourself. To write is to assert presence, to refuse to be voiceless; to articulate your passions, and to know that those passions deserve to be discussed and explored. Poetry is how we assert that the world can be different.
            There is a never-ending flow of books that tell you how to be creative, how to be a writer, how to find success in the literary marketplace. These books propose how to be a success but rarely examine what it means to be a success. They don’t discuss what the benchmarks are for poets, or how striving for success can corrupt writing and lead to disillusionment and loneliness. The pursuit of success often discourages poets from fulfilling their literary potential. These books clog our shelves and present a false narrative that sets poets on an impossible path.
[…]
            This book, on the other hand, proposes—in a series of short chapters, missives, provocations, reflections, and manifestos—another way of thinking about poetry. To write poetry is to contribute to a balanced ecology, not to race to the top of a food chain. Do It Wrong can be read front to back, or back to front, or in snippets as you go. Read this book at random, flip to any page, jump around. Don’t be afraid to mark it up, write in the margins, or cross out the pages that don’t interest you. Dog-ear the pages, tear them out, and pin them to your walls. I hope you’re inspired to write back, to continue the conversation, to scaffold new ways of supporting poetry. Do It Wrong doesn’t have all the answers, but, ideally, it will help you ask more questions. (“CHOOSE WISELY”)

The latest from award-winning Alberta poet Derek Beaulieu is the deliberately provocative Do It Wrong (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2026), a title subtitled “How To Be A Poet in the Twenty-First Century,” an absolutely readable assemblage of critical essays, offerings and manifestos collected into what might actually be essential reading for those interested in writing and publishing, especially if the very idea confuses, intimidates or frightens. For those unaware, Beaulieu is not only the current Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, but the author of an absolute ton of published books and chapbooks across North America and Europe, including titles such as Surface Tension (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], seen of the crime: essays on conceptual writing (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2011) and with wax (Coach House Books, 2003) [see my review of such here], as well as a long-established micropress publisher of chapbooks, pamphlets, small journals and other ephemera.

jwcurry once suggested to me that the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was a great writer, to his mind, in large part because he was willing to fail (and therefore manage to achieve what hadn’t even been attempted), but Beaulieu takes that idea a step further, suggesting that anyone who wishes to engage with art generally, or with poetry and/or small press publishing specifically, should be willing to completely go against how it has always and ever be done. “Given the meagre audience for poetry and the microscopic financial rewards,” he writes, early on in the collection, “I suggest that you not only dance as if no one is watching but write as if no one is reading you. Because metaphorically—and mathematically—no one is.” Through a collection of short first-person essays, Beaulieu works through ideas on composition, community, publishing, education, awards, experimental writing, influence, mentors, support and other threads around literary production and engagement that so rarely get discussed, let alone in such detail. Referencing an ethos of sharing and community around The Grateful Dead, for example, in his piece “EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT WRITING I LEARNED FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD,” he ends with:

            The Grateful Dead and their fans see the music as only one part of a wider artistic life, and they eschew power and ownership at every opportunity except when it can be wielded to increase awareness, make space, or fund colleagues. The Deadheads I know trade tapes, jam together, offer ideas, play their favourite moments for unwitting converts; they are dedicated to being kind. We need more poets to act like Deadheads.

Do It Wrong is incredibly positive and generative, and strikingly honest about how literary publishing works and doesn’t work, offering his years of experience through the literary and small press trenches on how best to approach the work, and what one might expect (and not expect), and how best to propel the art forward. He speaks of experience over commercial reward, and pushing to purposefully make it weirder. Honestly, this is a book I wish anyone engaged with this kind of work, or wishing to, should pick up and read, from the established writer to the emerging ambitious kids seeking glory and career through poetry (and they are very much part of the landscape), to the moody teenager secretly scribbling out lines in their notebook. Beaulieu’s voice is clear-headed and optimistic, articulating a joy through the process of exploration, learning and risk-taking, and a suggestion that those merely in it for themselves will end up in frustration, missing out on all the possibilities that an engaged community offers. Do you know anyone like that? You need to pick up a copy of this book for them, as soon as you are able. As Beaulieu writes to close the short piece “EDITORS AND PUBLISHERS ARE PEOPLE TOO”:

I’ve written this book as much to advocate to poets out there as to remind myself of poetry’s potential, its beauty, and its wish of community. To give me a balm for the dark rings under my eyes, the frayed nerves, the sleepless nights, the anxiety that I see in the mirror and in the faces of my friends and colleagues.
            I write to help me become a better mentor, a better person, moving from words to actions… and to stay actively aware of the implicit and explicit lessons that I pass to my emerging colleagues.

Dani Spinosa, Whispering Gallery: Poems

 

There is one student who is attentive and thoughtful in my college Classical Mythology class. She wants to make video games and has played Hades maybe fifty too many runs and she draws me an illustration of a non-binary Herakles wearing a raver outfit with a furry lion hat. She stays after class to talk to me about her final paper. The windows of this room do not open. I wonder if I’ve ever been in a classroom with windows that open. She has questions about the impending strike. The room contracts. I feel the questions’ labour. The clock on the wall moves itself forward again and again. She wants to know which source is definitive. I can’t stop her from taking notes.

The latest from Toronto-area poet, editor, publisher and critic Dani Spinosa is the trade poetry title Whispering Gallery: Poems (Prince Edward County ON: Assembly Press, 2026), following her full-length debut, OO: Typewriter Poems (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2020) [see my review of such here], and the monograph Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2018). Furthering her exploration through the typewriter-constructed concrete poem, Spinosa’s Whispering Gallery is structured as a collection of duos—thirty-six two-colour typewriter poems titled via heroines from Greek mythology in alphabetical order, each of which follow first-person prose blocks—each pair held as point, and counterpoint. Alkmene, Alkestis, Andromeda, Antigone, Aphrodite, Ariadne, Artemis, and so on. Through the two narrative threads and multitude of voices, there’s an element of performance to this book-length suite, one that might sit equally at home on a theatrical stage, if one might imagine concrete poems, say, performed on stage (and honestly, why not?). Two actors on stage, each performing one of the two of this collection’s threads. The narrative quilt of her text blocks provide a structural through-line, writing on the many ways and times that women have been abused, reduced and restricted by the machinations, whether passively or overtly, by men.

Yes I am still—I am always—trying to find space for poems. I am looking for writing hours though my friends remind me that the day does not come with writing hours and you have to put them there.

Through both sides of the conversation, Spinosa writes trauma and women. “But I know traumas,” she writes, early on in the collection, “the traumas of women. My women. Other women. The real heartbreak stories. A woman answers the door with a toddler on her hip, bobs her up and down slightly as the cop details her husband’s DUI. A woman must birth her eight-and-a-half-month baby that, she knows, has died in utero while her family goes to their house to dismantle the already assembled crib. Burnt-down house. Stolen car. Missing cat. Kidney stone. One of those real asshole cancers that just doesn’t let go. This is a stupid game. There are only losers here.” From structural point to counterpoint, across these two threads, Spinosa offers a poetry collection of visuals and concrete poems that forms itself into a book-length essay, one that speaks to and through female agency and gendered violence, whether physical, emotional or cultural; a book that writes herself and students through heroines and old gods, a collection that directs itself, in whole, towards the young lady that will make the author an auntie, directing all this talk of agency and possibility into all the hopes anyone could have. This is Auntie Dani writing the world as it is and has been, and as it could be, all for the sake of this new life, an opening salvo of a mentorship, offered open-hearted, without cover or expectation or bullshit. Or, as she writes near the end:

I am here and you are there. Silly thing, that distance. I’ve been saying small, quiet things all morning while the dust and cat hair twirl in great winter angles of light. I hear the little whispers come and go as if it wasn’t me speaking them. I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’ll keep saying this shit anyway.

 

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one, : Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross, + Monty Reid,

[Manahil Bandukwala at the Brick Books table; Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner at the Assembly Press table] Another small press book fair! Do you remember my notes from last fall on the ottawa small press book fair [see parts one, two] or my combined notes on Toronto's TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market [see parts one, two, three, four]? So much small press! And our next Ottawa fair will be Saturday, November 14th at the Tom Brown Arena, so be sure to mark your calendars. Did you know there’s a zine fair coming up in Sherbrooke, Quebec on July 4th? (a handful of issues of Touch the Donkey will be available there gratis, by the way) And apparently there’s another Fisher Library Small Press Fair in Toronto on September 19^th!

Ottawa/Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross have been working a curious sequence of chapbook-length response projects (all part of a larger manuscript-in-progress, “THE SHOOKY SESSIONS (A Litany),” a handful of such appearing recently in print [including titles through above/ground press, № Press and Vallum’s Chapbook Series], one of the latest being Shooky Session 4 (with allergies) (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, June 2026), subtitled “Paul Celan, Selections / 11 December 2023 / Sarah Burgoyne’s Place.” Each chapbook-length project, it would seem, is composed as a collaborative response to a poetry title pulled off a bookshelf at random, this one being Paul Celan’s Selections (University of California Press, 2005), edited by Pierre Joris. As the note at the back of the chapbook offers: “This chapbook presents poems written during the fourth of seven listening poetry sessions that Stuart Ross and Jason Camlot held between December 5, 2022, and December 18, 2024.” With the other prompt-titles in the sequence, Celan is an interesting selection, given the work can’t help but be a richly generative text. The notion of the “response text” is one that runs the length and breadth of literature, including what one might term straight translation to more abstract translations, from bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire to Erín Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Anansi, 2001) to more recent mis-translations by Montreal poet Hugh Thomas. Not that a response is the same thing as translation, or even mis-translation, but I would say the ideas are certainly related. Siblings, perhaps.

As well, Ross is one of but a handful of writers (I would include Gary Barwin in such as well) who seem to be constantly, even perpetually, pushing the boundaries of their own comfort and possibility through projects, including collaboration, all of which can’t help but feed into either author’s solo work. I am very curious to see this eventual published collection, and the way each chapbook-length project might play off each other, possibly. As the poem begins:

The divers are crowned by halos.
They are not brainless,
nor are they flames of vegetable.
Let’s dance around my eyes,
celebrate my glorious decapitation,
my glistening kisser.

Ottawa ON/Grand Lake NB: In case you were unaware, New Brunswick poet russell carisse [see my recent interview with carisse here] has started a chapbook press, sider0xylon press, which debuted at this most recent ottawa small press book fair. One of the first titles is the sequence OPERATIVES by Monty Reid, hand-sewn and produced “on a 1929 LCSmith & Corona Standard #8-12,” each copy individually typed and numbered in an edition of fifty copies. Throughout this ten-part sequence, Reid invokes a slow and considered lyric unfurling that works perfectly in this format, each short section on its own page, allowing each line to properly absorb. As the opening piece, titled “Brush Pass,” reads:

You never know what you’ll be given.

You might not feel the slightest touch
as the messenger passes. 

You never know where it came from
although you suspect a source. 

Your job is not to know. You are the form
the message takes, every time.