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)