I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space. Of that most and excellent Gift of MODESTY To the Secrets of FOUR FIVE or EVEN SIX Dimensions He challenges the physicality of the page as a bodily engagement in recuperatingĮssential ideas embedded in writing as communication.Even as he was Initiated into the Mysteries In Flatland, Beaulieu excavates the fertile ground between form and content, gesture and geography, and word and meaning. Kenneth Goldsmith, poet & Founding Editor of UBUweb In the great tradition of Picabia, beaulieu creates a perfect work of mechanical writing with one foot in the concrete poetic past and another in the flat screen future.” The result is a new kind of flatness-call it non-illusionistic literature-a depthless fiction, one where image and narrative is reduced to line and shadow. The resulting graphical poem riffs off the common appropriation of Abbot’s story for the teaching of geometry to school students engages the double-function of printed material as both presentation and representation and is contextualised as an avant agarde literary act in the Afterword by renowned American critic Marjorie Perloff.Īs the Greenbergian modernists proclaimed the flatness of the canvas, so derek beaulieu reduces the page to a flat plane. In a hyper-exaggeration of the printed page as a representational form, beualieu extends Abbot’s premise by turning every page in the Princeton University Press edition (1991) into an alphabetical line drawing, and inverts the ‘encounter with the inconceivable’ for his three-dimensional readers by deleting all the text and posing a poem that makes no allusion beyond two-dimensions.
In prose form, Abbot described a two-dimensional universe inhabited by polygons, one of whom narrates the reader through an encounter with the inconceivable: a third dimension. Abbot’s famed science fiction novella from 1884, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, is spatially and conceptually appropriated by beaulieu in his acclaimed book-as-poetic-diagram of the same name. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions derek beaulieuĮdwin A.
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