The Calgary Blow-Out! is an annual literary festival put on by Calgary’s filling Station magazine. Now in its fourth year, the festival functions as a celebration of Calgary’s vibrant literary community — the performers are all either Calgary-based writers or have significant ties to Calgary’s writing scene.
Derek beaulieu, who served as editor of filling Station from 2004-07, and who founded Blow-Out! in 2005, has spearheaded two new features of the innovative literary festival: a small-press fair and a sound-poetry set. These complement the festival’s traditional gala readings, which take place on August 1 and 2, and the flywheel reading series’ prelude on July 31. The sound poetry panel will form part of the Friday night reading, while the small press fair will occupy the Saturday afternoon.
Beaulieu describes the small press fair as a means of showcasing a less prominent but central facet of writing in Calgary, and one that many readers are unaware of. “Basically, Calgary doesn’t have a huge publishing community,” he says. “A lot of the publishing companies tend to be outside of Calgary — Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton — so a lot of writers have had to turn to these alternate forms [chapbooks, broadsides, leaflets] in order to distribute their work, in order to get their work into people’s hands.”
What originated perhaps in necessity has morphed into its own art. Calgary has an exciting and exploratory small press scene. It includes Kevin McPherson-Eckhoff’s prettily hand-stitched chapbooks (even ryan fitzpatrick’s “Bad Shit,” a chapbook bound in toilet paper full of poems rejected from a manuscript, is lovely), Natalie Simpson’s self-publishing press Edits All Over to beaulieu’s own prolific No press. “You end up finding very creative ways of approaching a book,” beaulieu says. “I’ve seen books that are shaped like origami, or that have been rubber-stamped on food. There are all these various ways of trying to meld form and function and trying to find a way to artistically deal with the content of the book. Hopefully, the small press fair gives Calgary readership some exposure to creative ways of dealing with the form of the book as a container for writing.”
Beaulieu was also asked to curate a 30-minute segment of the Friday night gala reading and chose to assemble a sound poetry showcase. Sound poetry, Beaulieu explains, is particularly concerned with the non-semantic; that is, non-word-based aspects of language. “We understand how our bodies can communicate even if we’re not saying anything,” he elaborates, citing a shrug of the shoulders or a flip of the bird as examples. “But we use our mouths, and we use our voices to communicate in ways that aren’t necessarily words. Whether that be an ‘mh-hm,’ an ‘uh-huh’ or a ‘hmm?’ We know how these sounds work. So what are the poetic possibilities of that range of communication?” It is this range of voice and communication that sound poetry is primarily interested in, according to beaulieu. “If concrete poetry is the exploration of the visual aspects of language, how language looks on a page, then sound poetry is the sonic exploration of language, how language sounds — where the meaning is not necessarily something that the words give us, but it’s something that the sounds give us.”
The 30-minute collaboration beaulieu has curated features Christian Bök, Ian Sampson and Jordan Scott. Bök is known for his virtuoso performances of some classical sound poetry pieces, particularly the Dada work of Hugo Ball. Scott’s most recent book, Blert, published by Coach House Books, explores the poetics of the stutter. Lastly, Sampson studies Tuvan throat-singing in addition to poetry. In this unusual form of singing, the vocalist creates a sound in their chest as well as a nasal sound that harmonizes to produce a third.
