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

A radically liberating collection of essays, ideas and approaches to writing and teaching poetry

Do It Wrong is a short, snappy series of provocations and suggestions designed to help poets think outside the box and foster creativity.

It's a permission slip to take a path others reject, to do the counter-intuitive thing, to embrace the weird.

It's a guidebook designed to bring poets together, to question our assumptions, and to move past the "business as usual" educational models into the new, the strange, and the "wrong."

And it's a playful, purposeful contribution toward the building of stronger, more resilient writing communities.

For readers of Beth Pickens's Make Your Art No Matter What and Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist, Derek Beaulieu distills 20 years of experience teaching creative writing into a joyfully mischievous manifesto on how to write and teach poetry with meaning.

Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent volume of fiction, Silence: Lectures and Writings, was published by Sweden's Timglaset Editions, his most recent volume of poetry, Surface Tension, was published by Toronto's Coach House Books. Beaulieu has received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for his dedication to Albertan literature. He is the only graduate from the University of Calgary's Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts 'Celebrated Alumni Award' and the only graduate in creative writing to receive Roehampton University's Chancellor's Alumni Award. Beaulieu has served as Poet Laureate of both Calgary and Banff and is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.