With the Bard

Bardcode, Gregory Betts (Penteract Press)

Are the grids of coloured squares in this hardback book visual art, conceptual writing, asemic writing, concrete poetry or a Shakespearean joke? In his Preface Philip Terry uses the phrase data poem, which is technically correct and a useful description but does nothing to convey the sheer beauty and complexity of the work.

Greg Betts has translated the sounds in Shakespeare’s sonnets into colours and each of the 154 poems into grids, highlighting not only the syllabic count and Shakespeare’s playful disruption of it at times, but also the numerous rhymes throughout all the poems. Terry notes that ‘the music in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is not confined to end-rhymes, but is there in every syllable of every poem, demonstrating how the sounds of the poems are literally orchestrated, making liberal use of internal rhyme and repetitive sound patternings and modulations of form and colour to weave their complex music.’

‘So what?’ you might say, or ‘I knew that’, but Terry quite rightly points out that Betts’ unusual ‘translations’ are a form of original research, a methodology that could be used with other texts to understand and evidence the complexities of structure and form.

Betts has previous for this kind of slippage between text and art, unexpected sideways movements as the result of intelligent and playful lateral thinking and cross-curricular activity. One of my favourites, an early work from 2006, is the haikube, a Rubik’s cube (or a beautiful handmade wooden version of it) with words on that can generate small, imagistic poems when rotated. I use the book version which documents this work with my students – it’s simplicity and outcomes are a good way to introduce and discuss visual texts, processual writing and to move their understanding or poetry away from ‘self-expression’, the dead weight that many writers drag behind them.

What is hard to convey in a review is simply how exquisite these visual poems are. The various blurb writers use words such as ‘jewelled’, ‘heatmap’, ‘glow & shimmer’, ‘chromatic’ and ‘rainbow’s tune’, not to mention ideas of synesthesia, colour-coding and stained glass. Flick through the pages and the poems seem hypnotically repetitive yet each one is utterly different, similar but never duplicate; the colours constantly change and, here and there, extra syllables stray into the right hand margin, disrupting the grid, unbalancing the page.

The block of only 12 lines that comprise Sonnet 126 is visually shocking when it appears, the three extra syllables of the fifth line of Sonnet 118 creep almost to the very edge of the page, and at first glance Sonnet 154 appears to have less syllables in its final line, although closer inspection reveals two pale squares representing unusual and gentle sounds.

There is a colour code at the back for those inclined to understand more and follow the process further, no doubt with Shakespeare’s original poems to hand, but I prefer to luxuriate in the deconstructed versions Betts presents us with, their singleminded focus on pattern and repetition, rhythm, rhyme and frequency, Bett’s clever and original mapping of language.

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Rupert Loydell

Find out more about the BardCode project at https://apothecaryarchive.com/bardcode-projects

(first published at Tears in the Fence)

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