| Gregory Betts | |
| Birth Place: | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Occupation: | Poet, Professor, Editor |
| Nationality: | Canadian |
| Alma Mater: | Queen’s University, York University |
| Subject: | Avant-Garde Literature |
Gregory Betts (born 1975) is a Canadian scholar, poet, editor and professor.[1]
He has taught at University of Toronto, Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Brock University, and University College Dublin. He is currently a professor at Brock University with a speciality in Canadian and avant-garde literature.[2] [3] [4] [5] He is the author of nine books of poetry,[2] editor of nine books of experimental writing in Canada, and author of the monograph Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and the monograph Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975 (University of Toronto Press, 2021).[6] He was named the Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University in 2014 [7] and the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin in 2018. In 2020, he became the President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, the largest literary association for the study of English in Canada.[8]
Betts was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but was raised in Toronto, Ontario. He graduated from Queen's University with a BA in English in 1998. He studied with Stephen Scobie, Misao Dean, Smaro Kamboureli, and George Bowering at the University of Victoria, where he graduated with an MA in 2000. Betts received his PhD in English literature from York University, supervised by John Lennox, Steve McCaffery, and Ray Ellenwood. He is a professor at Brock University[2] with a speciality in Canadian and Avant-Garde Literature.[3] [9] [5] He is the author of seven books of poetry,[2] editor of nine books of experimental writing in Canada, and author of the monograph Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (University of Toronto Press, 2013).[6] [10] He writes for The Canadian Encyclopaedia and his work is included in the anthologies Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing[2] (2011), The Sonnets: Translating & Rewriting Shakespeare (2012),[11] Concrete & Constraint (2018), amongst others.[12] [13] In addition to his books, Betts is the author of chapbooks and text collaborations with visual artists, including Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegel, Neil Hennessy, and Arnold McBay.[14] [15] He co-edited collection Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries (co-edited with Christian Bök, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019), a collection of 28 leading scholars and poets of the Canadian avant-garde.He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario with his wife and two children.[1] [6]
The University of Toronto Quarterly wrote, "Betts has created not only an invaluable archive of what it means to be 'modern' in Canada - the writings read like a cross-section of compacted layers social, material, and spiritual crisis in urban and rural Canada...but to the wider context of aesthetic, political, and spiritual fault lines of modern culture in English Canada."[16] In 2014, Betts was named the Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University.[17] In 2017, he received a City of St. Catharines Arts Award ("Jury's Pick")[18] and in 2018, he was named the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at the University College of Dublin, Ireland.
Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975 received the 2022 Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Book on British Columbia.[19] Dr. Susan E. Parker, UBC’s University Librarian, said, “The story laid out in this book, which is at once coherent and many-dimensioned, represents a huge volume of research material that has been thoroughly examined and analyzed. The book models what deft handling of complicated subject matter and materials should be. We are pleased to recognize Dr. Betts’ book with the Basil’ Stuart-Stubbs Prize.”[20] The book has also received the 2021 Gabrielle Roy Prize, which each year honours the best work of scholarship on literature produced in Canada written in English. The judges said, "Filled with visual evidence of a vibrant cultural movement, this is a crucial source for those with an interest in late twentieth-century poetry and visual art, the history of small press activity, and the cultural histories of Vancouver."[21]
In terms of his creative works, Betts published his first book of poetry, If Language, in 2005. The book consists of fifty-six anagrams based on a 525-letter source quote by Canadian poet and scholar Steve McCaffery. A contributor to the Lime Tree blog opined that "the poems hover on the edge of convincing signification, but lapse interestingly into arbitrary pseudo-sense and tonal oddness at every turn." Reviewing the collection in the Peek of Reach blog, Morgan Lucas Schuldt stated: "What sort of writer has the patience to pull off this kind of project? Well, the same writer who writes 56 such poems, all anagrams, each mining its constituent language for a range of tones and idioms. As collections go, If Language is at once inspired and humbling."[22]
In 2009 Betts published The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150; A Plunderverse Project. The collection of poems was accomplished by deleting words or letters from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 150 in order to create adapted works of poetry. Reviewing the collection in his eponymous blog, Rob McLennan remarked that "as much as this is a book of poems ... Betts' work is a treatise on the project itself, using quotes to work through the argument for its own creation, working through Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, John Donne and John Milton, among others."[23]
Betts edited the collection The Wrong World: Selected Stories and Essays of Bertram Brooker in 2009. The book highlights how Canadian visual artist Bertram Brooker played a significant role in the Canadian literary modernist movement. Through essays, short fiction, and a novella, Betts displays Brooker's views on culture, technology, and society as well as his hesitations with modernism. Writing in the British Journal of Canadian Studies, Anouk Lang suggested that "the short fiction and the essays would lend themselves well to courses on modernism, both in the context of Canadian literature and modernism considered more globally, while the volume as a whole will be of interest to scholars of twentieth-century thought and literature."
In 2013 Betts published Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations. The account looks at the presence of avant-garde literary aesthetics in Canadian national character and history since the start of the twentieth century. He shows parallels with other art forms and also chronicles noteworthy individuals of the avant-garde literary movements in Canada. Reviewing the book in Choice, K. Gale "recommended ... this highly specialized study."
Betts also published This Is Importance: A Student's Guide to Literature in 2013. The book compiles errors from years of mistakes by his students and organizes them to create a poetic collage. Betts pushes the importance of making mistakes as part of the learning experience and also for opening a window to new possibilities.
Again writing in his blog, McLennan declared that "anyone who has corrected student papers will easily appreciate this book of odd lines, misunderstood queries and just plain wrong-headedness that run through this small book, all lifted from years worth of student papers. I've long been a fan of the mistake and the accident, knowing just how important such are for the creation of new work, and the possibility for the shifted perspective. There are destinations that can only be reached by mistake, and Betts seems to understand this, discussing humour, mistakes and their importance in his lengthy introduction." Reviewing the book in This, Jonathan Ball observed that Betts's arrangement of the content helps to "produce strange, brilliant, unintentional wordplay, with accidentally clever insights that are often laugh-out-loud funny."