Brock University Professor Gregory Betts on His Favourite Poetry and Cities to Visit

Gregory Betts works as an English professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Born in Vancouver and raised in Toronto by parents from the Maritimes, Betts has spent summers out East since his childhood. “As soon as school would end… we would pile into the car and drive to Nova Scotia, where we have a family cottage. Betts now takes his own kids — ages 13 and 16 — to Nova Scotia’s Toney River, where they spend the days just as he did: running the beaches, hunting for mussels and scallops, and exploring. Betts credits Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee as his gateway into poetry. “I remember [it] so vividly. And then when I had kids, of course, I had to read it to them.” Experimental poetry, he explains, is a far departure from traditional poems, where they are written in lines and follow a specific rhythm. “I’ll just give you an example from my first book: I invented this form, which was paragraph-length anagrams. Each poem in my book, [If Language] — 56 poems — is a perfect anagram of the previous one.” It’s an approach both mathematical and scientific — building blocks that lead to something inspirational. “Like Lego, I would build them up into new works of poetry.”