Derek Beaulieu : ONTARIO HYDRO: Afterword

 

A logo is a period at the end of a sentence, not the sentence itself.

—Sagi Haviv

 

 

Ontario Hydro is excerpted from a manuscript in progress entitled Canada Modern. These visual poems – swerved logos – appropriate the corporate symbols of nationalistic marketing as typified by symbol-laden modernist design from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s. Canadian nationalism was shaped in part by these clean, northern logos and the businesses which commissioned the logos maintain headquarters, locations, and services from coast to coast.

Ontario Hydro swerves and distorts the 1962 logo of Ontario Hydro, as designed by Hathaway-Templeton.

Using photocopiers (ubiquitous in every office and corporate headquarters, used to multiply and reproduce the images and documents of corporations), the logos of this national experiment are smeared and distorted. What remains instead of cool modernism, are smears of oily residue pooling on the surface of polluted lakes and rivers. Corporate identities flow and eddy, distorting in sludgy waterways, leaky pipelines, and broken promises.

Concrete poetry attempts to incorporate the tenets of advertising and graphic design into poetry, to arrive at a poetics which is extra-linguistic (working across linguistic boundaries, much like wayfinding signage in airports) while still being evocative (soliciting an emotional or intellectual response, much like the finest lyric).

With Ontario Hydro, concrete poetry returns to that dialogue, fully embracing the work of graphic designers as part of a poetic discourse.

 

 

 

 

 

Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent volume of fiction, Silence, is forthcoming from Sweden’s Timglaset Books, his most recent volume of poetry, Surface Tension, was published by Toronto’s Coach House Books. Beaulieu has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students, the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for this dedication to literature, and is the only graduate from the University of Calgary’s Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts ‘Celebrated Alumni Award.’ Beaulieu holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University, is Banff’s Poet Laureate, and the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.