En savoir plus
Canada's most linguistically innovative poet takes on the "linear binary traps" of conventional logic, history and politics.
A propos de l'auteur
originalee from lunaria ovr 300 yeers ago in lunarian time
sent by shuttul thru halifax nova scotia originalee wantid 2
b dansr n figur skatr became a poet n paintr in my longings
after 12 operaysyuns reelee preventid me from following th
inishul direksyuns
-bill bissett
bill bissett garnered international attention in the 1960s as a pre-eminent figure of the counter-culture movement in Canada and the U.K. In 1964, he founded blewointment press, which published the works of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, among others.
bissett's charged readings, which never fail to amaze his audiences, incorporate sound poetry, chanting and singing, the verve of which is only matched by his prolific writing career - over seventy books of bissett's poetry have been published.
A pioneer of sound, visual and performance poetry - eschewing the artificial hierarchies of meaning and the privileging of things ("proper" nouns) over actions imposed on language by capital letters; the metric limitations imposed on the possibilities of expression by punctuation; and the illusion of formal transparency imposed on the written word by standard (rather than phonetic) spelling - bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently worked to extend the boundaries of language and visual image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry.
Among bissett's many awards are: The George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award (2007); BC Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Prize (2003)
peter among th towring boxes / text bites; BC Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Prize (1993)
inkorrect thots. bissett was a recipient of the Order of Canada in 2024.
Résumé
What is logic? Isn’t it a sickness we create? Useful for certain things, but not paramount in helping us be & share & change. Angels are rising in spirit places, helping us through & set against a back-drop of deaths, tortures, imprisonments, AIDS, big religious right-wing power control grabs, unroyal families, increasing poverty & the growing under class. Hierarchical constructs, elected or not, try to dislodge, shifting icons are dissolving & there is a nostalgia for what never was.
But we are not collapsing under others’ controlling: Our selves are infinitely dispersing. There is no palace and we are already inside it. There is much to celebrate. We board, fly & land & through the miracles of being, loving, needing & the wonders of language, though even the pilot is missing.
