Overview

Shakespeare built his famous sonnets by a unique sound pattern of rhymes in the final syllable, the tenth column, of each line. What was he doing in the rest of the sonnet? Sweet Forme: Shake-Speare's Perfect Sonnets is part of a broader BardCode project that maps out the full sound pattern of rhymes in all ten columns across all of Shakespeare's sonnets. Colour coding these sound-codes results in a visual text rich with the sonic patterns of the poems. Suddenly, for the first time, you can see the BardCode. Sweet Forme presents seven visualizations of this hidden BardCode in this second edition full-colour, softcover version. Following the Bard's own scheme, Sweet Forme reveals the complete rhymes for the very first time. Compiled and with an introduction by Gregory Betts. From the Introduction: What does the dominance of maths, however unseen, mean for art, culture, self, perspective, and time? Long before it became dominant, there was Shakespeare using the grid as medium to delve into these same questions. In 1609, he published a series of 154 sonnets called Shake-Speare's Sonnets. Now, from our vantage in the grid, we can recognize the sonnet as a poetics of math, the embodiment of the desire to define arbitrary frames and work within such limitations to reveal the buried structure of the world. These are poems that hold poetry up as vaccine to omnipresent ailment and decay. I invite you now, dear reader, to consider these timeless monuments to abstraction, the only perfect sonnets in Shakespeare's oeuvre, as anticipations and revelations of the meaning of the grid. Sweet Forme collects these perfect sonnets in this new full-colour softcover second edition.

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9780648807957

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Reviews

If sound is color then syllables are light & Shakespeare's sonnets sing a rainbow's tune in Gregory Betts's stunning feats of sleight. -Charles Bernstein Taking the tools of data visualizers and finding the perfect ones of Shakespeare's sonnets - this is the perfect revelation of visual poetry. -Petra Schulze-Wollgast, Editor of ToCall Magazine (Germany). Gregory Betts has found 'the sonnets most true' by William Shakespeare, selecting these seven poems because they conform exactly to a grid of 140 syllables (10 x 14) without ambiguity; then he has 'paint-coded' the palette of syllables that rhyme throughout these poems, thus exposing the chromatic qualities in the musical rhythms of the Bard himself. So beautiful, so wonderful, is this exercise that I kick myself for not having thought of it first; but I am grateful to know that one of my dearest friends has done it for me, only with more pigment and with more panache. -Christian Boek, Author of The Xenotext. Through meticulously colour coded rhyme groupings of William Shakespeare's sonnets in Sweet Forme, Greg Betts reminds us of the arbitrary, stringent, and also nearly always invisible power relations underlying every statement, phrase, sentence, word. The result of Betts' poetical-mathematical time travel that bridges Shakespeare's time of the Bubonic plague to our current time of the Coronavirus: the transformation of well-worn poetical phrases into page upon page of gorgeous colour-sound palettes. -Lori Emerson, Director of the Media Archeology Lab. The sonic qualities and possibilities of William Shakespeare's sonnets should be obvious to anyone who has ever read them aloud. In Sweet Forme, however, Gregory Betts reveals to us the visual properties of the Bard's mastery of language. Creating a heatmap out of trusted stanzas, Betts makes every syllable glow and shimmer in all the hues of Shakespeare's verse. -Joakim Norling, Editor of Timglaset Magazine (Sweden).

Author Information

Gregory Betts is a poet, professor, editor, and musician. He is the author of seven previous books of poetry, two academic studies on the Canadian avant-garde, and editor of nine books of experimental Canadian writing. This is his second response to the playground of Shakespeare's sonnets-the other being The Others Raisd in Me, in which he peels out 150 buried poems from the words and letters of Sonnet 150.

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