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.

Sweet Forme: Shake-Speare's Perfect Sonnets

Literature & Fiction

Betts, Gregory

History & Criticism

Apothecary Archive

If Language

Poetry

Book*hug Press

Poetry. Gregory Betts' BOYCOTT is a playfully poignant google-sculpture collecting our paradigm's closeness, it's likes, dislikes, hates, and boycotts.

Boycott

Make Now Press

Review\n"Finding Nothing is an excavation site for a special moment in Canadian poetic history." -- Ron Verzuh ― The Ormsby Review\n"Many scholars will find Finding Nothing especially valuable for its informational and bibliographical content. Detailed lists of ephemeral little magazines and literary publishers, tabulations of contributors to the major periodicals, a fulsome index, and an appended glossary of ‘Intermedia and Transdisciplinary Groups’ further enhance this landmark study of a transformational phase in Canada’s cultural history." -- Carole Gerson, Simon Fraser University ― The Canadian Historical Review\n"Gregory Betts has produced a literary history of the avant-garde in Canada like no other. Finding Nothing offers deep reflection on the meaning of the new, including accounts of the positive transformational effects upon human structures of perception and the violent forms of erasure that the ‘transnational cultural flow’ of literary activity in and out of Vancouver has entailed since that space’s appropriation by European settlers, through its examination of the histories of modernism, up to the present. With a combination of fastidious archival research, deep critical insight and empathy, and a most engaging style of historical storytelling,　Betts has opened up important space for the development of alternative, decolonizing accounts of the literary avant-garde in settler Canada." -- Jason Camlot, Professor of English and University Research Chair (Tier I) in Literature and Sound Studies, Concordia University\n"Rich in aesthetic and personal anecdotes gleaned through interviews, Finding Nothing proposes that the mythologies of Vancouver modernist poetics both arose from colonial conditioning and worked against it. Readers will appreciate the intimate photographs and reprints of rare materials from private collections and institutional archives – the collation of these dispersals makes visible these absences from public spaces as an ongoing colonial erasure." -- Felicity Tayler, Research Data Management Librarian and Interim Head of Research Services, University of Ottawa\nExperimental 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.

Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975

University of Toronto Press

Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space (The Ratcatcher Poetry Series)

Barwin, Gary

Allen, Lillian

Exile Editions

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