National Poetry Month : Gregory Betts,

 

 

 

The Idea of Moths

flames have no shadows

when the moths come pure in their pursuit
their singed bodies fall
into the word jumble of newsprint
die on my table into an ad
where the word bed
looks like a bed
by last night’s wine
on my table

search in daylight for moths but
they answer where, when, what
by replacing w with t 

and, there, when you discover
the news that
Winnie the Pooh in Winnipeg
was a she
you learn
that all skittles taste the same
that happy Casper, before he died,
was once the ghastly Richie Rich
footage might be measured in feet
but nobody films the growing pile
of dead and dying moths 

and then when the moths come back,
what, they seem to shrug,
as if more embarrassed for you,
flames have no shadows

you learn
that they turn dark in sooty times
rare and luminescent in an apocalypse
and always disappear in the daytime
in disinterest
for the sun pales to a candle in the dark

 

 

 

Gregory Betts is an experimental poet with collections published in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Ireland. He is most acknowledged for If Language (2005), the world’s first collection of paragraph-length anagrams, and The Others Raisd in Me (2009), 150 poems carved out of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150. His other books explore conceptual, collaborative, and concrete poetics. He has performed these works hundreds of times, in many countries, including at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games as part of the "Cultural Olympiad.” He is a professor of Canadian and Avant-Garde Literature at Brock University, where he has produced two of the most exhaustive academic studies of avant-garde writing in Canada, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013) and Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975 (2020), both with University of Toronto Press. He is the President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive, and Associate Director of the Social Justice Research Initiative. His most recent book is Foundry (2021), a collection of visual poems inspired by a font named after a 15th century poet. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.