Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet In the Twenty-First Century

by Derek Beaulieu

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2026

About the author

From wikipedia:

Derek Alexander Beaulieu (born 1973) is a Canadian poet, publisher and anthologist.
Beaulieu studied contemporary Canadian poetics at the University of Calgary. His work has appeared internationally in small press publications, magazines, and in visual art galleries. He has lectured on small press politics, arts funding and literary community in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Iceland.
He works extensively around issues of community and poetics, and along those lines has edited (or co-edited) the magazines filling Station (1998–2001, 2004–present), dANDelion (2001–2004), and endNote (2000–2001).
He founded housepress in 1997 from which he published small editions of poetry, prose and critical work until 2004. The housepress fonds are now located at Simon Fraser University. In 2005 he founded the small press no press.
In 2005 he co-edited Shift & Switch: new Canadian poetry with Angela Rawlings and Jason Christie, a controversial anthology of radical new poetry which has been reviewed internationally.
Beaulieu has shifted his focus in recent years to conceptual fiction, specifically visual translations/rewritings. His book Flatland consists of visual patterns based on the typography of Edwin Abbott Abbott's classic novel Flatland and his book Local Colour is a series of colour blocks based on the original text of Paul Auster's novella Ghosts.
How to Write, a collection of conceptual prose, was published by Talonbooks in 2010.
Beaulieu lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Reviews

[Discordia Review · Rating 2 out of 5]

In his own practice Beaulieu is an extremely prolific experimental poet, and it’s consistent with that ethos when he concludes that, since you’re not going to sell anything anyway, you are therefore free to do whatever you want to do. (In fact, Beaulieu laudably makes available free of charge nearly everything he’s ever published.) The underlying message here is that gatekeepers have no real power once you realize there is practically nothing behind the gate that you cannot acquire on your own. Publishers don’t like your stuff? Make some zines and give them away. Depressed by your lack of readership? Burrow deeper into the community of fellow (similarly profoundly unread) writers. Prizes are a scam, winners chosen by exhausted compromise, laurels of thin air on scalps of thinning hair. There’s a lot to these basic premises that a Discordia reader can sympathize with.

In some ways, this all makes for a nice antidote to the Save the Cat!-style writing manuals that purport to instruct aspirants on techniques for producing commercially viable work while (in reality) stuffing their imaginations into boxes. But Beaulieu’s blandly optimistic tone is too similar to these For Dummies handbooks for comfort. In many respects, something like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet could also be described as a “self-help” book for “creatives,” but for all that book’s tenderness and pragmatic statements about the writer’s life, its great, defining quality is the seriousness with which it treats poetry. Upon being shown the works sent to him by the ‘young poet,’ which the reader can infer are of middling quality, Rilke’s remarks are tactful and generous, but he refuses to praise the poet unduly—one senses that to do so would be a betrayal of both his correspondent and of poetry. What he gives instead are his own ideas on how to see and to feel in such a way that, whether one has a genuine talent for verse or not, one can live in a condition of humble sensitivity that is conducive to poiesis.

By contrast, despite obviously being an obsessive who has moulded his life around his art, the Beaulieu of Do It Wrong mostly sounds like he’s talking about a hobby of little real consequence beyond signposting one’s own quirkiness. (I yearned for the prickly grievance farming of Stuart Ross’s cult classic Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer because, in addition to being funny, it was clear how much it burned his ass to see hacks have more success than the genuine talents—most notably himself.) As with most contemporary artists, Beaulieu has been forced to spend nearly as much time teaching in creative programs and hustling for grants and patronage positions as he has working on his own poetry. That’s why even when he tries to get serious about defending the importance of the genre, he can’t help but answer like the creature of the system that he is. Beaulieu checks off the required references to the supposed positive economic impact of Canadian artists (despite having established the puniness of poetry’s current stature); to Indigenous peoples (via a shoehorned-in two-pager on what ‘thinking like Natives’ can teach us about community); to Representing Identities, and so on and on.

Read the full review at DiscordiaReview.com

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I nodded so hard while reading this that I may have sustained a neck injury!! Having come through an MA in literature with my love of reading destroyed I am familiar with the systems Beaulieu critiques in this book. His approach to making art, and poetry specifically, is one based in radical freedom, community, and collaboration. I only returned to a dedicated writing practice recently because I stumbled into a writing community that embodies nearly everything Beaulieu embraces as essential to thriving as an artist and making meaningful contributions to the poetic world. Artists of all kinds should read this book. I will be returning to it regularly and hopefully catching Beaulieu at the October Vancouver Writers Festival.

[Sigrun Hodne]

Derek Beaulieu’s enthusiasm for poetry and his permission to experiment are genuine. Not every chapter landed for me, and much of it felt more inspiring than profound, but I sympathise with the project.