Bill Bissett

Bill Bissett (alternative spelling: bill bissett ; born November 23, 1939 in Halifax , Nova Scotia ) is a Canadian poet and performance artist .

Life

Origin, drop-out and first work

Bissett, the son of a judge, ran away from home several times as a child in order to once go with a circus and to escape the conventional life of the middle class . In 1958 he moved to Vancouver , where he began studying at the University of British Columbia , which he dropped out in 1959 to work as a writer and painter. Although his poems harmonized with the experimental creativity of the movement around the literary magazine TISH , he did not succeed in finding a publisher for his concrete and visual poetry . As a result, he founded in 1962 his own literary magazine blewointment to publish his own poems, but other, similar working poets like bpNichol and Steve McCaffery promote.

Bissett, who wrote the initials lowercase in his name and wrote it as bill bissett, is known for his varied orthography and the combination of lyric, visual and sound poetry with drawings and collages, as well as for a deceptively naive voice that reflects the personal and political acumen of his work veiled. From the beginning, Bissett's works such as the poetry collections lebanon voices (1967), sunday work (?) (1969) and awake in th red desert! (1969) put down the artificial barriers within and between art. Its idiosyncratic phonetics and quasi-phonetic spelling essentially represent the sound of the words as in the pronunciation: 'devotions' becomes 'devosyuns' and 'people' becomes 'peopul'. Along with empty spaces and a lack of punctuation , this gave Bissett's poems many characteristics of a score . Here concluded awake in th red desert! he even made sound recordings of Bissett's readings and was thus a forerunner of some sound recordings that he published in the 1980s, such as sonik horses (1984) and luddites (1987).

Experimental poetry and awards

The compilation of a book published by blewointment created visual and tactile patterns in addition to repetitions, typography and physical production. For example, the poem Liberating Skies was composed of a string of the word "earth" (earthearthearthearthearthearth), so that the word collapsed into three words that developed into a theme: "earth", "hear" and "heart". The poems in the oversized book IBM (1971), on the other hand, were all handwritten and several suggested symbolic associations for letters as pictograms : X, for example, for a prayer wheel .

A similar aesthetic appeared in bisset's paintings , in which faces merged with heavenly images, and bodies transformed, and the images aimed somewhere between representation and symbol.

The strength in bill Bissett early work led to the publisher House of Anansi Press with the collection NOBODY OWNS TH Erth (1971), the first of his books outside of British Columbia published. With a growing readership, he published more than 25 books in the 1970s, in particular MEDICINE my mouths on fire (1974) and the collection of poems and collages stardust (1975), which dealt with the impersonal and symbolic qualities of iconic images. As his career progressed, his compositions deepened some of their earlier diversity and focused on text and line drawings.

Bissett's poems, partly influenced by Warren Tallman's style and open in language and illustration, combined expressions of love with philosophical inquiries into the value of love, and anti- materialism with the pursuit of peace. As a result, alongside Douglas Babour , George Bowering , bpNichol, Stephen Scobie , Fred Cogswell , Alden Nowlan and Al Purdy, he was one of the representatives of experimental poetry , which developed a more colloquial, regionally rooted form of poetry from the basics.

However, he criticized attempts to control or regulate thoughts and experience and as a result found himself exposed to some criticism. From 1977 to 1978 a group of members of the House of Commons cut public funding for his work because of the counter-cultural aesthetics of his works. Due to the resulting financial difficulties, he was forced to sell blewointment press in 1983.

Nonetheless, he remained productive and influential and in later years published his most thoughtful works on his literary philosophy in what we have (1988), for which he was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1989 as well as for hard 2 beleev in 1991 . For incorrect thots (1993) he was awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1993.

In 2006 Nightwood Editions published the book radiant danse uv being , a commemorative publication by poets and small publishers dedicated to him. The Night Wood-Verlag had also blewointment revitalized to Bissett aim of the publication to promote innovative Canadian poetry. In 2007, Bill Bissett was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to British Columbia literature.

Publications

Gregorian chant , 1958 Th jinx ship nd othr trips , 1960 Th jinx ship nd othr trips, or, Fires in the temple , 1966 We sleep inside each other all , 1966 Heat makes the heart's window for Martina , 1967 Lebanon voices , 1967 Mantras , 1967 Meth means death , 1967 Th gossamer bed pan , 1967 What poetiks , 1967 Where is Miss Florence Riddle , 1967 Awake in the red desert! , 1968 Liberating skies , 1968 Of th land divine service , 1968 Wagon wheeelsss , 1968 Lost Angel Mining Company , 1969 Sunday work? , 1969 IBM , 1970 S th story I to , 1970 Tell me what attackd yu , 1970 What fuckan theory , 1970 Why dusint the League of Canadian Poets do sumthing nd get an organizer for cross country poetry reading , 1970 Bill Bissett , 1971 Blew trewz , 1971 Dragon fly , 1971 Drifting into War , 1971 Nobody owns th earth , 1971 Tuff shit , 1971 Polar bear hunt , 1972 Pomes for Yoshi , 1972 Th high green hill , 1972 The ice bag , 1972 Words in th fire , 1972 Pass th food release th spirit book , 1973 Th first Sufi line , 1973 Drawings , 1974 Living with th vishyun , 1974 Medicine My Mouths On Fire , 1974 Space travl , 1974 Vancouver mainland ice and cold storage , 1974 What , 1974 Yu can eat it at th opening , 1974

Image being , 1975 Stardust , 1975 Th fifth sun , 1975 Venus , 1975 An allusyun to Macbeth , 1976 Plutonium missing , 1976 Th wind up tongue , 1976 Pomes , 1977 Sailor , 1978 Th first snow , 1979 Beyond even faithful legends: selected poems , 1980 Sa n th monkey , 1980 Selected poems , 1980 Soul arrow , 1980 Northern birds in color , 1981 Sa n his crystal ball , 1981 Parlant , 1982 Ready for framing , 1982 Seagull on Yonge Street , 1983 Fires in the tempul , 1984 Canada gees mate for life , 1985 Animal uproar , 1987 What we have , 1988 Hard 2 beleev , 1990 Incorrect thots , 1992 Th last photo uv th human soul , 1993 Th influenza uv logic , 1995 Loving without being vulnrabul , 1997 Scars on the seehors , 1999 B leev abul char ak trs , 2000 Lunaria , 2001 Peter among th towring boxes, text bites , 2002 Rainbow Mewsik (Poetry) , 2002 Th oranges uv orantangua , 2002 Rumors Uv Hurricane , 2003 Narrative enigma / rumors uv hurricane , 2004 Sublingual , 2008 Novel , 2011

Background literature

• Carl Peters: Textual vishyuns. Image and text in the work of Bill Bissett , 2011
• Don Precosky: bill bissett: controversies and definitions

Web links

• Private homepage
• Entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Entry in Canadian Poetry Online
• Entry in Poetry Foundation
• Works by Bill Bissett Open Library
• Background literature on Bill Bissett (Open Library)
• Four Poems by Bill Bissett
• Sound Poem on YouTube

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Don Precosky (online version) ( Memento of the original from November 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.