Stephen Bett

Stephen Bett's Broken Glosa from Chax: wow! Wow!! WOW!!!

    Ron Silliman, Facebook post

The glosa is an interesting Renaissance Spanish Court form the basic premise of which is that the poet quotes four lines of poetry as an epigraph from another poem or poet. These four lines act as a refrain in the final line of the four stanzas improvised by the poet.

The original Glosa or Glose was a form requiring:

• A cabeza (or motto) - the quatrain borrowed from another poet, whose authorship must be acknowledged
• Four 10-line stanzas, each ending with one of the lines in sequence from the cabeza.
• A rhyme-scheme requirement that lines 6 and 9 rhyme with the final word of line 10.

The form has been modified and adapted much the same way as the ghazal has: by dropping requirements and rules, shortening lines, and moving the cabeza to different positions in the stanza.  The idea is to write a new poem acknowledging the source poet's style.

Annie Finch, in her manual A Poet's Craft, (University of Michigan Press, 2015) writes (pp34-36): The lines of these stanzas can be of any length; the point is that each stanza elaborates or explains one of the four lines in the cabeza, and incorporates it (sometimes as the final line, like a refrain). She adds This form concretely acknowledges the links between poets - the ways in which one poet's work can spring from another's.

She quotes PK Page: 'I was introduced to the glosa through the ear. Its form, half-hidden, powerfully sensed, like an iceberg at night, made me search for its outline as I listened...I enjoyed the idea of constructing the poem backward - the final line of each stanza is in effect, the starting line...I liked being controlled by those three reining rhymes - or do I mean reigning? - and gently influenced by the rhythm of the original.

Stephen Bett goes farther than anyone else I've encountered, in taking the level of improvisation to both the macro level of mood, diction, tone, and theme, and the micro levels of syntax, line, phrase, word, even affix or letter - and punctuation!  Better yet, he leaps about like a gazelle on the moon, not only managing a micro history of the modernism and post-modernism (and all the post-mortem-isms a society deserves from its post-modern stances and individual styles), but he celebrates and plays with the individual authors' styles.  The range is encyclopedic! Post-avant  in the sense that it points forward, beyond Olson and Creeley's composition by field and proprioceptive kennings.

Best of all, the work is not only accessible - at multiple levels - but it's hip, clever, fun - and frequently uproarious.  Always mellifluous and inventive in the ways of the best jazz improvisation, always jumping from formal to vernacular diction and slang:

"Ed Dorn: Slap 'o Slap 'o Daddy-o"

in soccer/ when you do something good

you get a hug and a kiss

In american football/ when you do [ditto]

you get a slap on the ass

The Sociology of Games--Ed Dorn (with a touch of Derrida)

In soccer/ when you do something good

something mo' comes back/ in spades (& shades)
sump'ting saves the day, makes hay/ on the ol' post-plantation
Paid yr money now git it on the ride, road-tester

you get a hug and a kiss
you get a Europass zone-out zonk'o
you win your spurs up the yid army
you get a peck & you're faced ('n spaced)

In American football/ when you do [ditto]
that ten percent amo a'muricano numero uno el afraid'o
factors upward (pigskin wise) ditto schmitto LGBT QPR'o²
while behind the touchline there is nothing, queenie

you get a slap on the ass
that a'muricana macho aggro loverlie'o
homo-eroticismo beats thart that's
homophobi'o, beats it big league
up, down, & off, slap'o slap'o daddy'o

2. Queen's Park Rangers (not to be confused with Lady Di's Sloane Rangers)

Everything is up for grabs in these poems, fueled as they are as much by leaps of sound as by image.  Even the academic tradition of footnoting abstruse connections and links gets a send-up drubbing.  A homage to P.K. Page, Hologram for P.K. Page edited by Yvonne Blomer and DC Reid, will be out shortly from Caitlin Press.  A good place for the reader to start, but don't forget this volume to see where the form is going.

This collection belongs on every would-be poet's shelf; it's that essential, and may well be Stephen Bett's Best book to date. 

                            --  Richard Stevenson, Pacific Rim Review of Books

Traditionally, a glossa goes like this; you quote four lines of a poem by another poet, then create a four-stanza poem in which the four lines quoted form, in order, the final four lines of these new stanzas so that the first line of the epigraph is the final line of the first stanza, the second line ends the second stanza, and so on.

In Broken Glossa, Stephen Bett inverts this mould somewhat, as he uses the quoted lines not as the final but the first lines of his new stanzas. The glossed poems are by 'post-avant' poets, 60 or so, in alphabetical order of surname, with a bonus seven in a Covid 19 postscript. The result is a work of creative criticism, a way of rereading the originals. It's also deeply hypertextual, with references to other poems by the glossed poet, other glossa in the book, other poems by Bett, nods to other writers, and frequent references to Bob Dylan (and occasional ones to other singer-songwriters). This hypertextuality is also underpinned by extensive footnoting (161 notes across 135 pages of text). At times the 4X4 rule is broken, with parallel columns of text, or five-line stanzas.

The result is by turns exhilarating, frustrating and impossible to quote from. Almost. Here's the first stanza from the glossa on Paul Blackburn's 'Old':

Shall we dance that one around again?
Twist again, like we did last summer...
Brisk strokes w/ troubadour folks
But deft like your own Franz Kline

In this stanza we see something of Bett's method in miniature; the pop culture, the glancing reference to Blackburn's work as translator of troubadour song, and the tendency to lean on sound as organising principle, with a concomitant delight in bad puns. This last is more evident in these lines from Jonathan Williams' 'At Brigflatts Burial Ground'

Eighteen months after you left us,
Full coarse bunting, bambaazled to a fault
& by the sound oop norf, you bet
Light airs of music /we are left with
(the last line being a quote from another Williams poem).

A very interesting read, but difficult to review coherently.

Stephen Bett's Broken Glosa is a complex poetry collection that serves as a poet's reaction to experimental writing over the last fifty years or so. However, it also performs other functions: commentary, continuation, explanation, and inspiration. In essence, these glosa poems are intricate pieces that each function on their own. Therefore, the reader must conceive of them as requiring a similar reading process but with very different touchstones since they respond to other poems/poets. As the book progresses, there are footnotes on the poems, which add even more layers. In other words, it's very easy to get pulled into a web of literary history, interpretation, and original creation with these pieces.

Bett organizes the book alphabetically based on the poets' last names. This listing strips the poets from their "groups" (think "isms"), and provides a focus on them as individual poets. Bett then glosses whole poems or bits of poems with his own poems that respond to them, explain them, or just use them as jumping-off points. Rupert Loydel found this process to be "a kind of in-joke for those in the know" because it references poets personally and might leave behind the reader who is not up on contemporary poetry. That's an understandable critique, but often Bett takes the original poems in new directions or adds things tangentially related. So, while an intimate knowledge of the poem might help, it's not always necessary. Take, for example, these lines from "Robert Creeley: Company of Others":

why not, buy a goddam big car.
question for the dummies & generic Johns:
was that a real poem or did you
just make it up yourself?'

The first line is from Creeley's well-known poem "I Know a Man," and Bett's first line of response is aided by an awareness of the original. However, the next two lines play on the original less so. The question "was that a real poem" brings up multiple ideas. Is what Creeley wrote really a poem? Was it a poem based on "the real"? What, for that matter, is a real poem? Are the glosa poems real poems? In other words, are poems starting from other poems real poems because they don't start from the real world but only from language poems? See, we could keep generating questions prompted by this poem without even knowing Creeley. Does it help to know that Creeley's poem deals with the questions of the worlds we create to keep ourselves from facing the potential nothingness? Yes, perhaps, but it's not essential. Plus, the glosa poems do something refreshing: they show us a poet in the midst of other poems/poets finding inspiration from them and grappling with what they have written. I would argue that most poems do similar things but without the specific references and names, so it's nice to have them here. The use of humor and images from Bett's life highlights this process, but he also writes through many of the ideas of the original poets.

On the one hand, this book is a fascinating look at literary history in the late 20th and early 21st centuries with interpretation and commentary. On the other hand, the poet gives us new pieces that are inspired by the originals. For example, in "Lew Welch: Which Planet Are You (Currently) On?," Bett takes a poem that's fine, not great, and injects it with questions that go beyond the original poem. The speaker takes us from Welch's original place on our planet out into other planets, floating with questions of existence. This process happens many times throughout the book and is one of the things that makes it a worthwhile read.

-- William Allegrezza, Rhino Magazine (Vol 7 No. 1: January, 2024)

Marvellously inventive and thoroughly enjoyable!

I just finished Broken Glosa and wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed reading it. I had seen most of the collection in manuscript but it's so much more exciting to hold the finished book in my hands. There's a definite art to be appreciated in the look of the lines, stanzas, and poems as offered by an author through a fine publisher.

You know that your poetry has knocked me out since the first time I had the opportunity to review it. As I've said to a couple of writers lately, your work makes me see the world differently; it makes new pathways in my brain.

I love the play with language, the humour, the satire, the audacity of your creativity. The many echoes reverberating through the glosa (even from this book to other collections) are a sly delight. Bravo!

    John Tyndall (poet/reviewer)

I tell my first-year students that I don't ever rush home after work to unwind with a book of poetry. Like them, I find much of it a chore to read. The canonical poets--people like Purdy, Atwood, even cummings--aren't that much of a problem because at least there's a trace of logical syntax in their work that leads to a handful of comprehensible propositions, a narrative, or at least a few clear images. 

More unorthodox poetry, though, is different. Much of it is esoteric, lacking in clarity and sense, an intensely private language whose authors fiddle with words and syntax to deliver something that, apparently, can't be delivered in regular sentence forms we're taught to write in school. Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that if, instead of uttering a simple request to a person like "bring me sugar" or "bring me milk," he experimented with his grammar and said "milk me sugar," that person would "stare at me and gape" because "this combination of words makes no sense." 

The same can be said for some avant-garde poetry. For all the good it does us, it can leave ordinary readers staring and gaping.

Probably the best way to confront the bewildering thickets of poetic language is to sideline all preconceptions about what a poem is supposed to do or communicate. The language of everyday life refers to other people, the weather, and clothing, but poetry, as literary critic Jonathan Culler once put it, is "language organized to attract attention to the linguistic structures themselves". It's a message that we so easily forget that it's good to remind ourselves every once in a while that poetry isn't always about great big ideas or metaphorically tangled subjective experiences--the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling," according to Wordsworth--but about the intricacies of reading, the proprieties of grammar, and even the tenacities involved in writing.

Cue Stephen Bett's latest collection of poems, Broken Glosa. The marketing blurb on the back cover tells us the book "takes the 'glosa,' a Renaissance Spanish Court form, and breaks it down to its contemporary essentials--fractured forms for fractured times--riffing on postmodernist and post-avant poets in ways that are as surprising and inventive as they are richly textured." 

To simplify, these historically fashioned poems aren't the style most readers are familiar with, unless they're avid readers of Dadaist, Surrealist, Concrete and other forms that aim to undermine reading habits, disrupt notions of what poetry is, or upset our thoughts about what language does. 

No, this book, the blurb continues, "plays out Bett's lifetime in North American and British avant-garde poetry, taking the measure of 67 postmodernist poets," which is to say it's an innovative homage to other innovators in poetry to whom his work is indebted.

I didn't know much of Victoria-based Bett's work prior to reading Broken Glosa, but I commend him for adapting the challenging fifteenth-century Spanish form to his own "avant" ends. These are not the most lucid poems, but nothing packaged with those scary prefixes like "avant" and "post-" ever is. 

Their delivery of content is sidelined in favour of recursive displays of baroque structure. Traditionally, a glosa, which stems from the Latin word for an explanation of a foreign word and the Greek word for "language" itself, is an extended comment on another poem. It usually opens with a snippet of text from another poet, with every ten-syllable line in each of the ten stanzas interpreting a particular line from that snippet. That's more or less what Bett does here, kind of like sampling other artists' material in electronic music or hip-hop, only with vigorous postmodern inflections throughout.

In a nod to the convention of organization, Bett (Back Principles) alphabetizes his sixty-seven riffs on other poets' work, and the first provides a notion of what the rest are like. In "Rae Armantrout: I put a glose on you," a "nod" to the American language poet, Bett's studied speaker offers us this: "Around the block / headed for juiced circuits / attenuated hypotaxis / Always runnin' around ...." The quatrain, which trails off into an ellipsis, doesn't rest on its content but on its relationship with a line from the original, Armantrout's poem "Habitat," where we read this fetching couplet: "Around the block / dogs bark at absence." Bett then works the second line into "dogs bark at absence, / The gap in the fence / koan-flaked inflection / How put a spell on you ...," again ending with an ambiguous ellipsis. 

This stimulus-response structure repeats itself sixty-six more times. His more familiar nod to an icon of CanLit, "George Bowering: Scatter-Gun," sent me looking through my shelves for Bowering's "Against Description." 

Bett opens with Bowering's memorably self-reflective stanza, "I went to the blackberries / on the vine. They were blackberries / on the vine," and then adds this more equivocal coda: "on the vine. / ouch, it's all so Thea-retical, yr daughter stomped / on my stocking feet scatter-gun & no we're not / doing Bök today, no OuLiPo left in our DNA." 

A tad complicated, no doubt, but clever and well worked, too, and if readers were to search for an Archimedean point of reference in all this perplexing wordplay, they might grab onto that allusion to postmodern academic and writer Christian Bök, whose 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize winning work Eunoia, a sort of touchstone for experimental univocalic poetry, consists of five chapters each using only one vowel. 

Like Bök's work, which is itself an homage to the obscure Oulipo group of French poets who set themselves the task of writing according to inordinately disciplined techniques--a poem where each line is one letter longer than the preceding line, for example, or prose where the first word in each paragraph is the last word in the preceding one, and so on--Bett writes to satisfy formal constraints rather than to communicate content. 

Admittedly, reading him can be tricky, even infuriating at times, especially to minds weaned on the rule that sensible thoughts, if they want to count as thoughts at all and not remain in the nebulous state of ideas, must be housed in grammatically correct sentences, or at the very least in proper combinations of words, as Wittgenstein might say. 

Outside the reverent alphabetical ordering and rules of the glosa form, there's an absence of obvious orientation here, and I suppose this is what makes the collection post-avant. 

The words on the page, in the tradition of the West Coast Language Poetry movement of the 1960s and '70s, defy logical paraphrase. Randomly browse the sixty-seven glosa and you might not be sure how you should read them because the deep structure of subject-verb-object syntax, along with most punctuation markers and some morphological rules of word formation, have been tossed aside. You might not even be able to separate literal from figural words or even parse a subject in any phrase. 

In the glosa on Jan Zwicky, for example, "Zees & Zeds Tamped Down," we read "words. Words, words, words, words. / Consumption every line, baby letters, commas / Zuker punch / tiny comas every breath / petite mort, each exhale dead on a wire." Fragmented expressions and deconstructed phrase structures like these proliferate, and no amount of reading acumen helps resolve the quatrain into a unit of meaning--not even when you look to the bottom of the page and read the prosaic footnote explaining that "Zuker" is a reference to Mark Zuckerberg (and I'm not at all sure if the missing "c" is part of Bett's poetry). You may be aware that Bett is executing some charming poetics here--and he is--but you'll likely not be sure how the cortexes in your brain responsible for word recognition and reading are supposed to process it.

For all his experimentations with the black marks on the white pages, there's something important to be said about Bett's language games. Any linguist will tell you that description is only one of the many acts we do with language. Roman Jakobson positioned the "referential function" as one of the six functions of language, the others its poetic, emotive, conative, phatic and metalingual operations. We use all of them on a regular basis, though we prefer to think only in terms of the logic-chopping referential function where words and sentences are portals to preexisting things because we're habituated to it from an early age. 

Bett breaks this habit, in effect avoiding what Ron Sillman, one of the founders of Language Poetry, called "the tyranny of the signified." "What's happening is the language," he remarked in his 1987 essay "The New Sentence," which is as much a classic in linguistics and literary theory as it is in experimental poetry. "Not only in the usual sense of being interesting (which it is), but in the new sense that words are events, as real and important in themselves as war and lovers."

It's the materiality of language, in other words, that Bett's poems are "about." This is perhaps best recognized in his more colourful, zany glosa. 

In "Robert Kroetsch: Would You Buy a Bruised Lemon from This Poet?"--a glosa framed by that writer's 1980 poem, "Sketches of a Lemon"--Bett writes, "I kissed a lemon / so how do you broach a kroetsch? / windy carbs float big air / bruised auto, the more you toot." A reader who, like me, will likely miss most of the allusions embedded in these unusual lines can still laugh along with it. 

In "bpNichol: these are my words", a riff on Nichol's gorgeous lines, "i look at you this way / noun then verb / these are my words / I sing you," Bett's speaker writes "these are my words / 'Joe in the old coach house on Walmer' / that v. same one, Hey Joe! where you goin' / down Kendal that ol' map in your hand." You don't need to read the long footnote explaining the reference to a coach house in Toronto's storied Annex neighbourhood to recognize the sampling of the Jimi Hendrix lyric. And you probably don't even need to ask why the allusion to "Hey Joe" is there in the first place. It just is, maybe because it just is a melodious combination of words. What the lines say, they do, and they do only what they say, no more and no less. 

All poetry buffs might like this book, but those who move in experimental poetry circles will enjoy it for sure. 

Confronted with the historical and intertextual patterning of these glosa--and by the fact that many of the lines just don't make sense in the way we think they should--readers accustomed to the prosaic logic of sentences who don't go in for meta-poetry, or aren't familiar with the poets Bett glosses here, may find little in it that connects with their reading tastes. 

I confess that my first reading of Broken Glosa triggered bad memories of sitting in a graduate school postmodern lit theory seminar where we all compulsively name-dropped, referenced radical literary techniques, and spoke of meta-this's and that's as though we were the first generation to have thought of them. 

Just like in those abstruse seminars, reading Bett's work left me wondering if I wasn't smart enough to get what's going on here. Yes, there is an insider's club feeling here, but that's to be expected in a collection that positions itself among sixty-seven poets of the last century. 

If you persevere a while and stay with the language experience, you can find something of value here.

I've got to hand it to Bett. For all the moments of misunderstanding I experienced reading Glosa--and there were a lot--his book reminded me of something that I know but often forgot, which is the simple fact that poetry is first and foremost about words. 

In "Sharon Thesen: North Shore Scrawl," Bett riffs on a line from Thesen's "I Drive the Car": "My car I drive back & forth / road-testing the language, one hand tied to the wheel / the other transcribes white signal scrawl /Drive, he sd, you'd never sound like a machine." 

There's a couple of explanatory footnotes here that I didn't pay much attention to them, but I think I got the point. Poetry really is "road-testing the language."

-- Peter Babiak, British Columbia Review (December 26, 2023)

Lift Off is a book-length serial poem consisting of 45 numbered Lift Offs, each with an additional subtitle. The sequence concerns the break-up of a marriage in the wake of the complete mental breakdown of one of the spouses, Bett's wife. As such, it is rooted in a kind of grieving and regret, but, as the title implies, there is an underlying sense of hope, of the potential for a future beyond both break-up and breakdown. Both threads come together in the recuring image of a bird, battered but stubbornly taking flight: (Read More)

~ Billy Mills
From Elliptical Moments, April 25, 2023

Reading the eighteen poems that comprise Stephen Bett's Our Own Stunned Heads induces a sensation that is not unlike careening down one of those corkscrew water slides. You find yourself gathering speed, somehow negotiating the well-banked corners, gasping at velocity attained on the straight stretches, and always, always fending off a deep-seated fear that this might be the time something goes wrong, this might be the time you don't make it before you arrive, triumphantly, at the end. What a ride!

― Linda Crosfield

Un/Wired is the 18^th book of poetry by celebrated Canadian poet Stephen Bett.... This book is largely a satire on culture, a sendup of the common..., the unthinking, the state of the unconscious violence of the western world that feeds into the monied corporate elite.... Un/Wired breaks new ground, trashing sacred cows with a wink and a promise....

The poet plays with language, sometimes invents new words, tangles and repeats words, dangles words in escarpment, as event. Most of the poetry [consists of] short, tight sentences―minimalist―turning the words in on themselves with an edge of humor, a sawed-off shotgun delivery, a projection of the violent culture....

The book... is divided into four [sections]: "Pre-Wired," "Soft-Wired," "Hard-Wired" and "Un-Wired." Reading Un/Wired cover to cover, it starts slowly and builds to a crescendo, beginning with satire and then in the last [section] some love poetry that highlights... emotional violence....

A subtle, raw edge, jazz to jazz in the N.A. street. A fantastical work of post-modernist satire exposing the bones of the violent western malaise in an exciting evolution of the Beat tradition.

― Subterranean Blue Poetry

I do like this type of writing in The Gross and Fine Geography: New & Selected Poems, with its outcome of impropriety: the stumbling, reversals, jesting, equivocality, the wrong beat in the wrong place, the offbeat. As long as the image is diaphanous and the music upright, verbal grandiosity is never needed. The fissure attracts the curious more than the polished stone... From the sidewalk of matter (language) Bett journeys the way to the Divine, and what is divined is immateriality, that which comes betwixt breath and breath. Simply put, Bett is one heaven of a love poet. His poems are about love, the love of woman, the love of justice, the love of music, poetry, and art. He lifts the sidewalk up to the brink on a platform where few care to stand...

In, beneath, and above each single word and space, Stephen Bett's Selected Poems recalls the story of his experiences; his poems are diary entries, reworked transience. He sings, he screams, he doubts, he cries, he tears everything apart, and then glues the world back together, one piece at a time. From "too many maybes" we venture to something where "it's like the world turns in the sky." Matter mutates into Stephen Bett's jive.

― Antonio D'Alfonso, Pacific Rim Review of Books

At 180 pages and in the fluorescent coat of many colours―in this corner, author of 18 books and counting―Stephen Bett, linguistic gymnast and parable prognosticator. This is heavyweight stuff. These poems are the onslaught of a simply unrelenting force... You can't pin Bett down because he comes at you from all angles... [The opening] poem pretty much says it all about Stephen Bett's intentions...a statement of purpose writ large. Then Bett puts his foot down and steamrolls us through thirty-one years with his gargantuan and generous voice... [And he] knows how to be a sweetheart and a lovely jazz rat...

The Gross & Fine Geography: New & Selected Poems is a book worthy of all your attention.... Bett burns with the best. Grace, music and beauty along with a few moments of quiet desperation, The Gross & Fine Geography changes gears more than a few times and it is an exciting ride all the way through this rambling taster from Bett's previous books.

― Michael Dennis, Today's Book of Poetry

Stephen Bett's big, 178 page collection [The Gross & Fine Geography: New & Selected Poems] ... covers many years (starting with poems from 1983), and includes poems from over a dozen of his previous books. It's an impressive showcase of how Bett writes about human conundrums and modern life. The book's title with its multiple puns suggest a broad swath of possibilities --and that's what Bett gives us, using a wide variety of poetic techniques and an ironic, self-aware sense of humour....

Stephen Bett is a mature, experienced poet, who uses language in a wide variety of ways. He has serious things to say, but says them with a sharp wit. His poems deal with the contemporary. They are pertinent to the lives we live, and have much to offer. I am glad for the chance to review this collection and be introduced to his work.

― E.E. Nobbs, The Poetry Shed

The Gross & Fine Geography, which starts with poems taken from Lucy Kent & other poems (1983), shows that [Stephen Bett's] work has indeed grown over the years. By the time the reader gets to the poems taken from Un/Wired (BlazeVOX Books, 2016) Bett has come a long way. His sureness with the modes of the older poets [Williams, Pound, Zukofsky, and the Don Allen anthology poets] who have inspired him is deft. It is this deftness that impresses. Bett's wit and playfulness with language stand out. I was often reminded of not just Kenneth Koch, but of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, too. Those poets used longer lines than Bett does in his later work. His short line -- quite minimal, really -- reminds me more of both Creeley and Larry Eigner. Every word must be the truly correct word in a form that highlights each individual word... Indeed, the more recent work of Bett reminds me of Eigner's "A Gone" and "B" in the Allen anthology. And, in my view, Bett's latest poetry is much like Eigner's work in books like The World and Its Streets, Places, one of my best-loved books...

I do not wish the reader to think that Bett only reads American writers. He also admires Canadians like Louis Dudek, Ken Norris, and Phyllis Webb. Nonetheless, Bett's finest work seems to extend from the American poetic developments of the late 20^th century. And I thought the finest poems in this "selected" were reprinted from Sound Off: a book of jazz (Thistledown, 2013). Bett really nails it in "Pat Metheny", capturing the "feel" of the guitarist's music. So too with another guitarist: Bill Frisell.

The deep richness of a poetic tradition always seems wonderful. While Bett and I share many of the same literary roots -- Pound, Williams, Olson, etc. -- our writing is quite different. This is because each poet takes a tradition and makes it his or her own. An example: the late, great Raymond Souster had his roots in the Pound-Williams-Olson tradition. So did Louis Dudek. But Souster, Dudek, and Bett are quite different poets. Perhaps the signal aspect of The Gross & Fine Geography is that Bett's book shows how one poet -- in this case a poet in British Columbia -- has extended modern and postmodern concepts into the 21^st century.

― James Deahl

I love what Stephen Bett is doing with language in his latest opus, Those Godawful Streets of Man.... Bett's his own man here. He's absorbed the lessons of the Objectivists, Beats, Black Mountain, New York and San Francisco schools; the Canadian Tish poets' experiments with vernacular phonological phrasing in open form; the studious avoidance of the "burnished urn" Modernist reliance on myth, metaphor, and intellectual conceits, dense allusion, tight boxed containers.

Not that Bett's poems aren't marvelously allusive; the bric-à-brac of pop culture is all here: movies, cell phones, the Web, selfies, Tweets and all manner of squawks from the Interface. But there is nothing overtly confessional and the stitches and strophes are as comfortable and companionable as a Tetley Tea bag or new silk pyramid of the latest craft tea. The allusions are to pop culture events: post-modern texts, not obscure texts....

This is minimalism for readers who like their poems fat: rich, but sans impasto or ornament. A book of raw wire in the city: edgy, tense, sharp, angular, dangerous--in the electrified, computerized grids of cityscape we inhabit, and in the boxes we place each other in and peer out from... as we attempt to touch through wires and wireless interfaces, en face, live and in person in an age of celebrity cast-off culture and relationships.

At the heart of the book and appearing late in the accumulating narrative--the overall alienation we 21st-century zombie citizens feel facing globalization and its feral children--is the story of a dissolving relationship, the man too earnest and accepting; the woman raging and fading into madness. But nothing is cloying or mawkish or sentimental, or even confessional; instead we shift easily from a sort of Special Victims Unit episode of macro family skeleton news to deeply personal, eviscerating sorrow, with grace and elan.

Musically, rhythmically, the poet is adroit, fluid, as graceful as Sonny Rollins on a good day. You can feel those tight turns, drops, and ascents as you might on a carnival ride; Bett doesn't waste a word, but pastes you to the back of your vernacular cage. You are in for the ride.

Line for line, strophe for strophe, image for image, Stephen Bett's latest delivers the news, along with the tart taste of jazz and blues.

― Richard Stevenson, Pacific Rim Review of Books

In Stephen Bett's book Those Godawful Streets of Man: A Book Of Raw Wire In The City, I found a look at a city that is just as the book describes: raw. It is an unapologetic, unflinching look into the back alleys and poorly lit areas of the human condition. It gives the reader a look into an urban anger and despair that is as haunting as it is unwavering. It is the kind of beauty found in ruins of past civilizations.

The two major themes that run through the book are the notes of despondency and disconnect that seem to pop up somewhere in almost every poem.

From the very beginning, Bett presents this sense of an unfiltered speaker that will walk you through this book pointing at the tragedies of a place with language that does not lose itself in self-deprecation or sentimentality....

This book does not slow down. The further you go into it, the more momentum it carries and the faster that momentum seems to be taking you. As this momentum picks up, the poems begin to change on the page. More and more lines begin to make up the poems, while those lines themselves become shorter. All the while, Bett is relentless in his tone, and finds ways to achieve his poems with fewer words as it progresses....

This is not a "feel-good" kind of reading. That kind of emotional pleasure, I think, you would be hard-pressed to find in its pages. But, if you are willing to follow Bett into this urban world of frayed wire, dark alleys, and empty boxes, you will find a voice that is braver than many, and a view of the world that is beautiful in its starkness. Those Godawful Streets Of Man: A Book Of Raw Wire In The City gives you exactly what the name suggests. You only have to take a breath and dive into a world perhaps more familiar than we would like to admit.

― Front Porch Journal (Texas)

Stephen Bett is damned sure that none of us is going to get out of this city unscathed. Those Godawful Streets of Man: A Book Of Raw Wire In The City is a little light when it comes to optimism; this book is a sneer from a mouth full of broken teeth...

In Bett's city someone just played the joker against any chance of a winning hand. People smear themselves like bloodstains all over their attempts to find love. Those that do find love discover just how flawed love can be. Those Godawful Streets of Man is an illustrated fall from grace, one gut punch at a time...

Stephen Bett's city is under siege, love is a doomed lost cause and you can't trust anyone in Those Godawful Streets of Man. Love and tenderness are abandoned as life cracks a hard whip over every sucker's back in these bruised beauties. There are no happy endings. Bett is betting that readers will recognize his remorseless city as a place they've spent time. We have all had our broken hearts turn black and brooding, and Bett is certain we'll remember. He gives voice to some angry sorrow. And these poems sting smart...

Those Godawful Streets of Man is not for the weak of heart. These poems are the white-knuckle, white-hot anger of pure emotional betrayal, the picked scabs of love. Dark and intriguing poetry. But it won't make you happy. Stephen Bett is damned sure that none of us is going to get out of this city unscathed.

This is the second time Today's Book of Poetry has gone into Stephen Bett world. No holding back in Bett world. These beauties sing.

― Michael Dennis, Today's Book of Poetry

Those Godawful Streets of Man: Wow! Blown away. "17th Street" and "32nd Street" took my breath away.... Very dark stuff. Dystopia has come home to roost in Stephen Bett's poetry!

― Lou Boxer (www.noir.com)

Breathing Arizona: A Journal offers a great collection of tight, striking poems that capture Stephen Bett's attempt to breathe life into a relationship.... This is surely minimalist beauty, and from one of the leading poets nowadays. I admire what Bett does immensely: minimalist poetry is an act of immense self-discipline, one of the essential tools for a writer in any medium. ― Richard Godwin (novelist, critic)

Breathing Arizona is a sweet, open testimonial [that] presents the poet, his humour, and his grace.... A flight of magic in a shattered and violent world [that can] make the angels sing.

― Rebecca Banks (Quebec blog)

In Penny-Ante Poems, Stephen Bett painfully confronts and disrupts the romanticism of modern day love. What remains of the self when myths are suddenly and inexplicably evaporated? In this startling collection lovers' dialogue dissolves into hoarse soliloquies. Each poem strips itself to the tender bones, metaphor is brutally denuded, and language is reduced to fraught stammer. Bett unravels the atoms of speech to uncover a new voice that coalesces desire and loss. Into a new (w)hole, he speaks to his own echoes.

― Orchid Tierney (poet, critic)

Stephen Bett's hip, lean poetry encompasses a huge range of jazz and moves like mercury between styles.... This is a poet who writes with a subtlety that keeps with the rhythm of his verse as he makes it all modern again.... This is an important and enjoyable book. For lovers of jazz and of poetry, Sound Off: a book of jazz is a great introduction to a major poetic talent who is also an acute observer of the contemporary world.

― Richard Godwin (London)

I've read the poems from Sound Off: a book of jazz several times over and must say I'm impressed. Nice to see you're writing Jazz, not writing about jazz. Some very subtle, sophisticated rhythm changes. Love the way your love of the music, with a kind of insider's obsessiveness, permeates the whole collection. Also appreciate the interplay between pieces, little tonal cues and echoes that evoke the playfulness intrinsic to jazz. For all its understated, unassuming airs you're really taking some risks here (not something I've seen much of in the last 20 years of Canadian Writing), pushing out against the perimeters with a kind of edgy assurance. Like this stuff a lot. Shows how thoroughly the craft must be learned before one can make it this malleable.

― Ken Cathers (poet)

The poet's love for jazz shines through in all of the poems in Sound Off, and fans of the genre... will find much to appreciate in this collection.

― Small Press Reviews (U.S.)

Sound Off: a book of jazz is jazzspeak, as if on a cloud drawing down fragments of light in broken thought forms, a celebration of some of the greatest modern jazz musicians of our time.

― Subterranean Blue Poetry (Montreal)

In Re-Positioning every ending has a kind of simulated punch line. Like we're listening into a conversation that's nothing but innuendo and that has to wrap itself up in innuendo, because that's what those kinds of conversations do, even though innuendo's just a pretext anyway... [This is the type of book] that changes the way you look at the world.

― Michael Johnson, So and So Magazine (U.S.)

There is no shortage of ideological depth in Stephen Bett's Re-positioning... but even more refreshing is Bett's subtle approach to demeaning the credenda of various literary critics.... Occupied by happy existentialists... and Freudian analysts, Re-Positioning feels like a 'Showtime' guide for those of us with the cognitive capacity for allusive, sometimes 'elusive' text.... Subtle inferences are made between the... real-life characters of the poems and the steady narrative voice, [which]... contains a rich sense of overlooked history in areas of religion, pop culture and medicine.

― Frankie Metro, Unlikely Stories (U.S.)

Track This: a book of relationship is a book of authentic minimalist poetry. The words are so modestly beautiful in their arrangement upon the white page while showing an emotional intelligence within the micro-text. Poetic minimalism is notoriously difficult to master. Yet Track This manipulates the sparse format so aptly that the outcome is a poignant expression of the tensions that exist [on the page]. At times, the collection demonstrates the understated gentleness of the English language with a human voice that makes the poetry so accessible to the layperson (while it beckons multiple readings from the widely read). To satisfy both types of readers is an incredible accomplishment.

― REM magazine (New Zealand)

Stephen Bett's works are characteristically sharp and superficially simple. Yet they mask a sincere emotion which, in subsequent readings, grows deeper with intensity. Brevity yields nuances, words become packed with unsaid dialogue, lines are meant to be read 'in between.' That being said, the layers within the poems are wonderfully subtle... Minimalist poetry makes its own rules to convey meaning but any successful poem should read beyond the printed word. Track This made me fall in love at first sight with Bett's work. I spent hours pouring over his book trying to understand how he melded particular nuances to words that normally yielded none. Several months on... the one thing I do understand of his work is this gut feeling: the hallmark of authentic poetry is the ability to inspire a determined thought process and― 'I wish I could I write like that!'

― Tuesday Poem

Track This... is an emotionally generous collection of stylistically spare poetry... that will likely challenge the casual reader to rethink conventional notions of language.... By toying with the conventions of language, Bett draws attention to the ways in which language and relationships are given to the same types of uncertainty.... We love because we want to connect, the poems in this volume suggest, and it's in the attempt, in the grappling we do in the dark among the interstices of communication... that we find the agony and ecstasy of all that makes life worth living.

― Marc Schuster, Small Press Reviews (U.S.)

I like these poems. A great book of beauties. Very sweet and clear!

― Michael Rothenberg (poet)

Track This literally tracks the birth and growth of a romantic relationship, which at first seems like fodder too common for poems. But about halfway through, as the speaker of the poems begins dealing with the tension in the relationship, the poems grow more complex and engender the struggle of loving and the struggle of poetry. Which I can get behind.

― Kelci McDowell, Switchback Magazine (U.S.)

Track This hits the spot... another good value read from BlazeVOX."

― James McLaughlin, Stride Magazine (England)

These poems in S PLIT are soooo delicious. Mouth-watering. Tingling....so bitter, so sharp, so sad. Such beautiful work. I am absolutely stunned.

― Judy Gouin (artist)

Canadian poet Stephen Bett's Extreme Positions: the soft-core industry Exposed skewers the would-be-wicked self-help genre of sex columnists, blogs, & manuals... revealing their desperation and often false urbanity.... The sophistication of Bett's shifting points of view and slangy, nudge-nudge/wink-wink diction focuses readers' attention on the queasy-making implications of law as a replacement for sentiment. Demonstrating the influence of postmodern American poets Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, and Anselm Hollo, Bett cuts his lines short and hones language. The intention is to thrust cleanly, as if with a stiletto, into the heart of his subject.... Clearly, Bett offers self-deprecation and wry chuckles along with his cultural critique.

― Billey Rainey, Exquisite Corpse (U.S.)

I'm already a big fan of Stephen Bett's poems, so these new ones in Sass 'n Pass only corroborate that fact. Bett has great energy and is full of life and, my god, he sure knows how to write... I really like the poetry -- immensely! I know if Joel Oppenheimer were alive he would love this new book. These are just the kind of poems he championed. All the poems are very good in this collection, but some are sensational, really, and I marvel at their execution and delivery.... They are pleasing to the ear, pleasing to hear, they look good on the page, they are so subtly crafted. ... Bravo! I'm still reading Bett's books and still liking reading them― great stuff, in fact.

― M.G. (Mike) Stephens (poet, novelist, critic)

Nota Bene Poems: a Journey comes with instructions, "NB serial poems: note well".... Language is deconstructed... disconnected....Through allusions to Dante... or to Rilke, we learn of [this poet's] Beatrice; she can become a sacred "other," while he morphs into... Brother Antoninus, The Rose of Solitude. With alchemical allusion to "the basest of metals" [and to] "my Boethius & my Virgil"... the poet seeks "dark hermeneutics" in Buddhist or Christian, Greek or Roman mythology.... With this micro/macro cosmology of the ancient world, [Bett] has made relevant and present, the successive reincarnations of Orpheus and Eurydice.

― Anne Burke, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature

Anyone who has read earlier books by Stephen Bett... may think that they know all about his style of poetry... his acerbic wit and his unforgiving view of all things stupidly human. His word-play and his eye for found poetry will be remembered in many inventive passages. Opening Bett's latest book [however] one is in for a great surprise: the author has turned his gaze inward.... Nota Bene Poems: a journey is a long, strange trip for the lovers [a contemporary Orpheus and Eurydice] and for the readers who will witness their story. Stephen Bett's poems really dig in to remain with you after you close the book.

― The Pacific Rim Review of Books (Victoria)

Stephen Bett's slangy, jivey Nota Bene Poems... has plenty of anguish and despair to share. The [71 part] serial poem identifies [a] couple in relation to... Orpheus and Eurydice. What's unique... is the loose and humorous notes that Orph sends down to his Eury girl in Hades. The man is suffering but can't help being sassy at the same time. It's a risky venture, love poetry. Bett pulls it off.

― BC Bookworld

Anyone who had read his [previous books] knows that Stephen Bett is an on-target... and serious satirist. He is outraged by the inanities of modern culture and doesn't apologize for his skewering of them.... [His] caustic wit is in top form in High-Maintenance.

― John Tyndall, The Rain Review of Books (Vancouver)

Stephen Bett's latest, High-Maintenance, takes a straight-edge to the oddities of contemporary life, both reveling in and tearing to bits the inanity of the everyday.... A scathing and hilarious romp through the frivolous horrors of actually paying attention to what's going on around us.

― Jason Dewinetz

A healthy mix of Kootenay school media saturated cynicism with an Olsonian sense of folksy grandeur.

― Tim Davis

Its mouthy pizazz & fearless taking on of whatever the pop & political culture throws at us.

― Don McKay

Stephen Bett [in High-Maintenance] cultivates a rebel's persona. His fractious and satiric idiom... calls for free forms. Syntax accelerates, and euphemisms and paragrammatic substitutions [find] likely targets.... The poems work because [Bett's] 'poetics' cues the blend of pop-culture and politics in the subject matter. Bett follows the cues... and his riffs work as comedy.

― Chris Jennings, Canadian Literature

The poems in Cruise Control are jewels, [each] with its ever-deft line, its plangent smartness, the way the suites build on themselves like architecture.... I love this book.

― Forrest Gander

Bett is noted for his experimental language poems and his quirky takes on 'postmodern' life.... In his new book, Cruise Control, he happily gores contemporary jargon and pretension...[in] those jazzy riffs on contemporary life that I have been citing with considerable pleasure.

― Marilyn Rose, Journal of Canadian Poetry

[In Cruise Control] there's a kineticism of line, neon trajectories of thought like tracer bullets.... Take a plunge into energy where the synaptic juncture has snapped leaving raw the wires of poetry.

― Zygote Magazine (Winnipeg)

Cruise Control embraces the best aspects of contemporary poetry: it revels in the English language, in the line, the stanza, the poetic form. This collection achieves a particularly fine balance between the comic and the serious, a testimony to a poet with heart. I look forward to many more fine books from Stephen Bett.

― John Oughton, Canadian Poetry Association

Cruise Control is as lively, irreverent, intelligent, bold, and original as your Lucy Kent poems. I do want you to know how much I respect your work.

―C.W. (Bill) Truesdale

What strikes me most about Stephen Bett's Lucy Kent and other poems -- other than its sheer skill, clarity of tone, diction, line -- is its unpretentiousness... His is an observant eye and a steady one, which plays close and thoughtful attention not only to the world but to the language.

― Peter Quartermain

[In Lucy Kent] one is struck by a freshness and an ease in the use of language as both subject and vehicle.... [Bett] re-invents language in the process of writing.... [His] book is extensive and full of poems which show an acute awareness of the politics of art and literature right from the opening lines [on John Ashbery and Jackson Pollock].... And that's the same sort of excitement Bett constantly injects into his poems.

―Cornelis Vleeskens, The CRNLE Reviews Journal (Australia)

Poetry is the traditional research lab where language gets re-invented.... In Lucy Kent... local poet Stephen Bett [demonstrates that] making words dance across the page should not seem like a subversive act.

―Alan Twigg, The Vancouver Province

Stephen Bett's Lucy Kent poems are clever and colloquial... and always filled with subtle constructions.

― Cathy Matyas, Essays on Canadian Writing