Bissett, Bill - Frank Davey (essay date 1974)

Frank Davey (essay date 1974)

SOURCE: "Bill Bissett," in From There to Here, Press Porcepic, 1974, pp. 49-54.

[Davey is a Canadian poet, author, and educator. In the following essay, he considers the mystical and political ideas informing Bissett's work.]

For the past fifteen years Vancouver has contained the largest and most cohesive left-wing artistic subculture in Canada. Throughout all of these years Bill Bissett has been one of its most outspoken and iconoclastic poets. Bissett's rejection of the conventional or "straight" world has been vigourous expressed not only in lifestyle but in ruthless alterations to conventional syntax and spelling. His contempt for orthodox society has caused him to be ejected from cross-Canada trains, evicted by countless landlords, beaten, harrassed by police, and arrested and sentenced to prison. His contempt for the orthodoxies of the printed word caused him for at least a decade to be regarded by the...

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