Gregory Betts
Gregory Betts is a scholar, editor, and experimental poet with collections published in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Ireland. He is most acknowledged for If Language (2005), a collection of paragraph-length anagrams, and The Others Raisd in Me (2009), 150 poems carved out of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150.
His other books explore conceptual, collaborative, and concrete poetics, thinking about the limits of language and the boundaries of communication. He has lectured and performed internationally, including at the Sorbonne Université, the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, the National Library of Ireland, and the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games as part of the "Cultural Olympiad”, amongst many others.
He is a professor of Canadian and Avant-Garde Literature at Brock University, where he has produced two of the most exhaustive academic studies of avant-garde writing in Canada, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013) and Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975 (2020), both published with University of Toronto Press. He has served as the President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin, and the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University.
He is currently the Curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive and Associate Director of the Social Justice Research Initiative. His most recent books include Foundry (Ireland, 2021), a collection of visual poems inspired by a font named after a 15th century poet, and The Fabulous Op (Ireland, 2022), a collaborative epigenetic romp through the canon with Gary Barwin. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Listening to Space
by Gregory BettsNew!!Space is supposed to be silent, so it comes as a shock to learn how noisy it is out there.