Afterword by Marjorie Perloff.
Information As Material (UK), 2007.
Read by Jesse Ferguson
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is conceptual literature for the hard-core 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 spiders’ 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 Abbott’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.
