We Who Are About To Die : Gregory Betts

Poet and professor Gregory Betts is the author of 7 books of poetry and the editor of 5 books of experimental Canadian writing. He also wrote the first history of Canadian avant-garde literature called, appropriately, Avant-garde Canadian Literature. His writing has won awards, been widely reviewed and anthologized, and taught in schools and universities across North America and in England. Betts is an activist for the literary community in St. Catharines. Since arriving in 2006 (to teach at Brock University), he has organized a constant series of events, creating a stage for hundreds of the best and most interesting authors from here and around the world. To this end, he is the founding Artistic Director of the Festival of Readers.

Where are you now?
I live in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, beneath the escarpment, between two lakes, a river, and many borders.

What are you reading?
I’m reading a lot of Indigenous literature lately (currently Emmanuel Anati’s The Imprint of Man), indulging in novels, and gearing up for another run through bpNichol’s The Martyrology.

What have you discovered lately?
Gerald Vizenor’s notion of “survivance”, which combines survival with resistance. In particular, he developed the idea in relation to the Anishinaabe people overcoming cultural genocide and persisting, which by itself is an act of defiance against colonial domination. I’ve been thinking about survivance more generally, too, as a way of thinking about life as a temporary defiance of death. As we delve deeper into the anthropocene, our species (and planetary) survival becomes an act of defiance. But against what? Ourselves? Death itself? I have been wondering if our survival will depend on a resistance to the temptations of capitalism, if we have the wherewithal to form the necessary allegiances.

Where do you write?
At home. When I can. Where is a place nestled in time.

What are you working on?
I just finished reviewing the proofs of my selected works of Margaret Christakos (due out in April). I am writing the odd poem, but avoiding a bigger project that has already stretched out over 3 years. I’m also revising a manuscript with Gary Barwin, revising a collection of essays with Christian Bök, revising my book on Vancouver avant-gardism, teaching, and developing the Festival of Readers (now in year two!).

Have you anything forthcoming?
My selected poems of Margaret Christakos is primed and ready to go. Nothing else is imminent.

What would you rather be doing?
This spring, I’m delivering academic papers at 3 conferences on 3 very different subjects (Concrete poetry, contemporary Indigenous art, and mid-20th century representations of Louis Riel), giving 2 public lectures (Feminism in the 21st Century for Boys, and something on Leonard Cohen), and developing a new online course on “Contact in Canadian Literature”, which is to say settler representations of Indigenous people and Indigenous representations of settlers. The material I’m working on right now, creatively and as an academic, is varied, challenging, and vital. My noise band broke up, though, so I’d love to get more experimental music into my life. Otherwise, there ain’t no place I’d rather be.


The Point


To know something is to see the point
I see it, over there, free of it. March from the frost of it.


Whenever it points at me
I cower, cover, clear. Pull the world’s space like a sheath around me. Step to silence.


The world machine and its celestial mechanics
The price paid is this telescoping mask. Pace, mine, terris.


The habitually boring
Machine that pushes me deeper into the earth. Laconic regulations.


I recover some aspect of myself
The luck of the rabbit ears.


My point traipses, drags heals
Land evokes ideas outside of gall. Barbarians. Land seizures.


Lumber as a passport, a plinth
On a beach, the horizon wavers. Plodding like diamonds.  I


Gad. Parade. Rove.
Trudge.


The point pins me down
I knock about,


Attack
Taciturnity. Hush.

On Writing #24 : Gregory Betts

On Writing

Gregory Betts

I like the messy body; not interested in only clean; the illusion of perfection. Mistakes embody the process of bodies. We slop, we spill, we tumble – and through an arduous process, we enable small moments of grace. The kind of poetry that I’m interested in – avant/conceptual/experimental/&etc art and poetry – is filled with attempts to highlight the importance of process – by which is often meant an acceptance of the mistake.

Kenny Goldsmith, who runs Ubu.com, in his book Soliloquy includes in the transcript a conversation where he reveals that he really doesn’t understand who Pere Ubu is or what he’s about. What astonishing generosity, honesty to include such a moment without editing it out. Ubu was a shithead, a guy lost in his own illusions. Was Goldsmith enacting Ubu by including his mistake, becoming late 20^th century’s ubu roi, or offering a wink to the observant? It’s that kind of elegance that I’m interested in with mistakes – where you reveal inverted, potential truths through errors, something perhaps inadvertently beautiful; discovering new terrain through mistakes.

Found poetry, appropriative writing, plunderverse, &etc, is laden with the rare mixture of innocent text with insight. Such unintentional poetry is, in fact, essential to teaching and to learning, but making mistakes is only a preliminary step in the process. There’s a reason the army of teachers out there spend so much time carefully correcting the mistakes in every essay, even when they know that many of the students will never even glance at those comments. We do it because error is at the heart of our enterprise, the moment’s chance to change the course of things to come: the inverted potential of the real lives of our students. But we should not be afraid of or disgusted by those errors – we have to attend to them, think about them more productively, exhaustively. Personally, I harvest them, revel in their spectacular vistas.

In This is Importance, I wanted to highlight the importance of the error –– not only because they are hilarious, but because they offer a glimpse into the process of teaching and learning, alongside rare glimpses of inadvertent beauty in student writing. In my classroom, in my poetry, I focus on the mistakes because I cherish the painful process of learning. My favourite mistakes are the ones that strive towards something lofty and often clichéd only to inadvertently arrive at a much more convincing insight. I don’t mean the ones where the language has no clue what it is revealing, and sit empty vestibules of incoherent letters. Those aren’t particularly interesting to me. I mean, the ones where the particular wording creates another possible truth that resonates. From that book: “Poetic form is how you tell a poem from nothing”.

A poetry from such mistakes is, to misparaphrase Robert Duncan, like a drug-addled addict suddenly happy and grandiose with a gladness to private meaningless pleasures, to profundities because they were depths, to ecstasies because they were heights—mere dimensions. A poet on writing.

Gregory Betts lives in St. Catharines, Ontario. His most recent books include This is Importance (Wolsak & Wynn 2013), a book of student errors on Canadian literature, and Avant Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (UTP 2013). His next book is Boycott, forthcoming from Make Now Press.

Readings by Betts & Lynes + holiday party with door prizes!

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