Gregory Betts

Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space - by Lillian Allen (Toronto's seventh Poet Laureate, a dub poet, writer, and Juno Award winner), Gary Barwin (poet, writer, composer, multimedia artist, performer, and educator), and Gregory Betts (whose writing explores the boundaries between self, other, and alien - the radical other) - is a collaborative collection that crackles in its exploration of land, language, and page space. Combining the intensity of Dub Poetry with the intricacies of experimental poetics, Muttertongue presents a sonorous soundscape echoing with the question of where (and why) is here (hear). The book opens with a dialogue between the three authors, and concludes with an Afterword by Kaie Kellough. The release of the book recedes a new music LP by the three authors (June of 2025). This is a project by the Muttertongue Trio: Allen - Barwin - Betts.

The Fabulous Op is a vibrant, collaborative poem born from a unique experiment: the authors invited their social media followers to share lines of poetry they hold close to heart. Through this fusion of voices, the book explores how the literary canon-like DNA-mutates and evolves, shaped by the lived experiences of those who carry it forward. The result is a sweeping, celebratory journey through poetic history, where fragments of a shared cultural legacy collide and intertwine, revealing how words can transform, disrupt, and reawaken. This work doesn't just reflect literary culture; it revels in its complexity, breathing fresh life into the canon with every line.

Experimental literature accelerated dramatically in Vancouver in the 1960s as the influence of New American poetics merged with the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Vancouver poets and artists began thinking about their creative works with new clarity and set about testing and redefining the boundaries of literature. As new gardes in Vancouver explored the limits of text and language, some writers began incorporating collage and concrete poetics into their work while others delved deeper into unsettling, revolutionary, and Surrealist imagery. There was a presumption across the avant-garde communities that radical openness could provoke widespread socio-political change. In other words, the intermedia experimentation and the related destruction of the line between art and society pushed art to the frontlines of a broad socio-political battle of the collective imagination of Vancouver. Finding Nothing traces the rise of the radical avant-garde in Vancouver, from the initial salvos of the Tish group, through Blewointment’s spatial experiments, to radical Surrealisms and new feminisms. Incorporating images, original texts, and interviews, Gregory Betts shows how the VanGardes signalled a remarkable consciousness of the globalized forces at play in the city, impacting communities, orientations, races, and nations.

Shakespeare built his famous sonnets by a unique sound pattern of rhymes in the final syllable, the tenth column, of each line. What was he doing in the rest of the sonnet?Sweet Forme: Shake-Speare's Perfect Sonnets is part of a broader BardCode project that maps out the full sound pattern of rhymes in all ten columns across all of Shakespeare's sonnets. Colour coding these sound-codes results in a visual text rich with the sonic patterns of the poems. Suddenly, for the first time, you can see the BardCode.Sweet Forme presents seven visualizations of this hidden BardCode in this second edition full-colour, softcover version. Following the Bard's own scheme, Sweet Forme reveals the complete rhymes for the very first time. Compiled and with an introduction by Gregory Betts.From the Introduction What does the dominance of maths, however unseen, mean for art, culture, self, perspective, and time? Long before it became dominant, there was Shakespeare using the grid as medium to delve into these same questions. In 1609, he published a series of 154 sonnets called Shake-Speare's Sonnets. Now, from our vantage in the grid, we can recognize the sonnet as a poetics of math, the embodiment of the desire to define arbitrary frames and work within such limitations to reveal the buried structure of the world.These are poems that hold poetry up as vaccine to omnipresent ailment and decay. I invite you now, dear reader, to consider these timeless monuments to abstraction, the only perfect sonnets in Shakespeare's oeuvre, as anticipations and revelations of the meaning of the grid.Sweet Forme collects these perfect sonnets in this new full-colour softcover second edition.

In Avant-Garde Canadian Literature, Gregory Betts draws attention to the fact that the avant-garde has had a presence in Canada long before the country's literary histories have recognized, and that the radicalism of avant-garde art has been sabotaged by pedestrian terms of engagement by the Canadian media, the public, and the literary critics. This book presents a rich body of evidence to illustrate the extent to which Canadians have been producing avant-garde art since the start of the twentieth century. Betts explores the radical literary ambitions and achievements of three different nodes of avant-garde literary activity: mystical revolutionaries from the 1910s to the 1930s; Surrealists/Automatists from the 1920s to the 1960s; and Canadian Vorticists from the 1920s to the 1970s. Avant-Garde Canadian Literature offers an entrance into the vocabulary of the ongoing and primarily international debate surrounding the idea of avant-gardism, providing readers with a functional vocabulary for discussing some of the most hermetic and yet energetic literature ever produced in this country.

what if the rain referred to something else? and bowling and shoes were done with the mouth? Sometimes language, thoughts, and emotions are a fixed structure like a warehouse. Sometimes they are fog, waves, light, or music. This is LSE: Language as a second English. English as a grammar of ghosts. Words as the snowfall of ideas. The Obvious Flap is a musical, poetic flux of recurring and recursive images exploring language's luminous fringes of language. The text weaves a variety of thematic threads of humour, literary allusions, and narrative into a fabric that spreads into an open, proprioceptive linguistic environment. Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts have concocted a collaborative jam session for multiple larynxes and have made an obvious flap as they have fallen through the mirror into Plunderland. not everyone is a poet my dog for instance.