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
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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
- ↑ 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.
personal data | |
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SURNAME | Bissett, Bill |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bissett, Bill (different spelling of names) |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Canadian writer |
DATE OF BIRTH | November 23, 1939 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Halifax , Nova Scotia |