in the early sixties out of the creative writing programme at ubc the tish group emerged with their insistence upon a poetry whose visual notation on the page was linked to & inseparable from the poets breath how you see it on the page is as score for how it should be read here they have brought the poem back to the music of the human body its breathing & reunited it with music from which for so long it seemed to have strayed

at the same time out of the painters studios & homes in the 4th & yew area in Vancouver a different approach to the same concern was emerging in th work of most notably bill bissett but also lance farrell & martina clinton in order to appreciate what bissett has accomplished in the years since his emergence it is necessary to take this concern with breath in a poetry which is an extension of the body & put it into a very broad perspective

the modern composer norman dello joio has said "notation is a primitive guide to music. The unimaginative are slaves to it, others see behind it" & the composer david behrman "a perfect notation is not one which documents exactly. If it were, today's technology would finally have provided the ideal notation—a tape recording or film of a correct performance. Notation is lively when it calls for a temporal result that can only be hinted at by its spatial systems, requiring more than an automaton to bring it to life." & john cage commenting on a particular composers work in his Notations "He erased his own music but it remains visible, paler than what he later superimposed. Suggestion: the concert of his various decisions. In this case, greater carelessness would automatically produce a music of greater complexity." now i have put these three quotes here to give you an introduction into an entirely different way of looking at the same area of concern we have already been talking about namely a poetry of breath and some way to notate it on the page

when lance farrel martina nd i were disregarding the boxd margins back in the early 60's nd bein considerd hopeless by our friends nd fellow poets we didint know th word concrete or any kind of poetry we were writing into, that this is what we were expressing, that what we were experiencing was outside of the narrow margins so we carried that to where th poem was too nd it was tough and no one understood ovr th years thru blew ointment ganglia tlaloc marajuana papers labris approches etc we began to see all ovr th world that othrs were into it too get a poem from japan nd yu got to understand it cause it wasint basd on grammar or sentence type thot so yu were there too which is what you want to be there

we fear the darkness but its cummin nd always turns into light

writing what s now calld concrete sound borderblur poetry etc is why we enjoyd so much malnutrition etc for so many years so i feel a special fondness for it

(bissett—undated letter)

sort of groovy about this concrete thing 'cause sort of what i've been doing all along to little avail around here th others sum of them to see it, what it is, that distant fuzz, an then here it breaks of its own, guess there were others screaming loving telling of how they were seeing it all ovr the world, that we are not to be bound, nor is any audience, cum & go, free to as they wish in & out of th poem, fill it with what they will—spaces for them

(undated letter)

what has from the first distinguished much Canadian & american concrete [particularly the Vancouver toronto niagara Cleveland grouping (bissett, copithorne, levy, kryss, nichol, aylward, wagner, uu etc)] from the rest of the world movement has been a fascination with the primitive by this i mean a fascination with chant another way of looking at chant is as insistence the use of which term brings up the lady who is probably bissett's biggest influence & certainly his starting point gertrude stein stein always made that distinction that tho in the making of americans she said everyone had repeating in them all the time she was to say later that in her way of writing about it her writing was not so much repeating as insistent or rather since here is the important distinction & why she used the word insistence that rather everyone should realize that it was not repetition it was repeating & that of course behind repeating there is that something which is insisting itself all of bissett's published works to date are illuminated with this insisting of certain things over & over again certain concerns & within that insistence an evolution of content concern context & conception "gertrude stein went into what do i carry inside me so much of the time of her went over within myself working thru it ever since saw to yur letter" (undated letter)

in an unpublished essay titled "Joyce, Stein and the Single Vision" steve mccaffery has written

gertrude stein showed us that imagery is a matter of syntax james joyce showed us imagery is an event of mental association stein showed us that the image is of language and not showed us that the image is through language that is she did not think the image as beyond the word but that images are a part of imagery and that imagery is a relationship of words to other words she knew that grammatical subordination prevents the single vision she knew that such subordination trapped the word in function and evil relationship she saw that this could be wrong

bill bissett in a section of S The Story I To writes

& a little later

correct grammar subject verb object imperialism, th subject, king bullshit acts on victims screw that

lets go back for a moment to looking at what stein meant by insistence

If you think anything over and over and eventually in connection with it you are going to succeed or fail, succeeding and failing is repetition because you are always either succeeding or failing but any two moments of thinking it over is not repetition. Now you see that is where I differ from a great many people who say I repeat and they do not. They do not think their succeeding or failing is what makes repetition, in other words they do not think that what happens makes repetition but that it is the moment to moment emphasizing that makes repetition. Now I think the succeeding and failing is what makes the repetition not the moment to moment emphasizing that makes repetition…. There was the period of The Making of Americans portraiture, when by listening and talking I conceived at every moment the existence of some one, and I put down each moment that I had the existence of that one inside me until I had completely emptied myself of this that I had had as a portrait of that one. This as I say made what has been called repetition but, and you will see, each sentence is just the difference in emphasis that inevitably exists in the successive moment of my containing within me the existence of that other one achieved by talking and listening inside in me and inside in that one…. As I said it was if you like, it was like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference and so there was the moving and the existence of each moment as it was in time.

(gertrude stein Lectures in America)

lets pause for a moment to refind bearings shooting out a barrage of information to present the context in which bissetts work moves stein said that for her her work was not repetitive that she was following the successive shifts in emphasis from moment to moment the longer she contained a thing inside her mccaffery points out that imagery is a relationship of words to other words "words appear to be names for things that arent there" (bissett—undated letter) what bissett is saying then is that the rules that have governed language & hence the people who live within that language for the last 1000 years are no longer good enough

william carlos Williams stated once in an article on james Joyce

If to achieve truth we work with words purely, as a writer must, and all the words are dead or beautiful, how then shall we succeed any better than might a philosopher with dead abstractions? or their configurations? … There must be something new done with the words. Leave beauty out or, conceivably, one might begin again, one might break them up to let the staleness out of them.

bissett is expressing exactly the same concern when he says in a letter "what else can yu do with goddesses except (screw) make love to them i ask yew" & in "The Caruso Poem"

but here is where bissett veers off from stein stein was very concerned with keeping in control of what was happening

In the portraits that I did in that period of which I have just been speaking the later period considerably after the war the strictness of not letting remembering mix itself with looking and listening and talking … this strictness perhaps weakened a little weakened a little because and that in a way was an astonishment to me, I found that I was for a little while very much taken with the beauty of the sounds as they came from me as I made them. This is a thing that may be at any time a temptation…. The strict discipline that I had given myself, the absolute refusal of never using a word that was not an exact word … resulted … in an extraordinary melody of words and a melody of excitement in knowing that I had done this thing…. This melody for a little while after rather got the better of me … But as I say I did begin to think that I was rather drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober. I must be sober. It is so much more exciting to be sober, to be exact and concentrated and sober.

(gertrude stein Lectures in America)

bissett's position is made very clear in "The Caruso Poem" where he states

& then after a cautionary note to the reader

for bissett then that intoxication with sound is what he chose to follow stein made the conscious decision to veer away to return to the concerns which had informed the writing of The Making of Americans bissett plunges into the maelstrom & there is a fatalism involved as he has said the voice owns the man

so what we are seeing here is bissett's concern with sound for it is very important to understand this it is very important to understand that out of his concerns with sound grew his assessment of the page as a visual field in the sense that the optophonetic poets such as raoul hausmann have defined it

The optophonetic poem must create an absolute unity of noises, sounds, and typographical forms which, when printed on the page, give a strange, exceptional space and a complex concretized abstraction.

It is no longer a grouping of vowels and consonants semantically arranged according to the rules of syntax, but rather a polarity of complements from a new spiritual world.

(Hausmann—"The Optophonetic Dawn")

this involvement with sound has been the basic one for the majority of the Canadian "concrete" poets…. bissett has never been concerned with a literal transmission of sense he is concerned with ecstasy

we are not only images
cumming together, within
this permission we suspend
doubt, are flesh, are
material, are meat filld
of air, of blood, fire, of
what matters is our waters
meet, again, we found time

(bissett—"The Sun Does Not Move")

he is concerned with getting across the instant of experience in whatever way necessary convinced that the only way to actually communicate with someone is to place them into your perceptual system

in especially th worst of th jail pomes th rhetorik spills ovr into undead for altho sum of ths pomes arent ordinarily worth publishing or writing and ium no critic seems like most convincing way to demonstrate that for me at least life th living of it its tensions energy needed to write in lively way, where only sittin' is waitin' for meal call or bissett bag nd baggage transfer to nother wing, th pomes tend to be downbeat a bit sorry bout that nd not in themselves very eventful: iron bars may be do not a prison make but wud yu believe this cardboard replica, tho with all life removd so were all distractions, nd such good opportunity for meditating is met: what is never ends: this is well, and perhaps also well it is for th element of choice to be

(bisett—introduction to Sunday Work (?))

the use of chant of insistence in the form of repeating phrases over and over again with the change being that of emphasis or intonation shows his roots in & debt to stein at the same time his losing of himself in the ecstasy that accompanies the chant experience his losing of himself in sound his giving himself up into that mystery is where he steps away from stein into the unknown into that region which is both primitive & uncharted tied in us as it is to deeper racial memory and the awareness of the universe as one organic entity within which sound is the key that sets the mechanism that balances things in motion this involvement with chant has been the central experience for all Canadian poets working in this area even in the pure non-linear morpheme & submorpheme pieces you will find in all Canadian work an underlying basis of chant it is the identifying characteristic of Canadian sound poetry

equally characteristic of Canadian sound poetry is the importance of improvisation none of the poets extensively involved in sound use the text as anything more than a point of departure thus notation becomes something to simply suggest the phonetic space the poem should or could occupy mccaffery insists his visual texts are acoustic pieces in themselves heard with the eye rather than the ear the same is true of bissett's work which brings us to a consideration of bissetts visual approach to aural notation

I gazed at Arabic letters today & saw the pictures.
Ium trying that with English now, getting nowhere.
So David sd that is, I am th picture. Why.

(bissett—Blew Ointment, Vol 2 No 4)

the man is inside his own language he is in there in the sense that he takes over the sound and claims it for himself takes language back to himself in S The Story I To bissett says "concrete only a categorie so yu can label it out of yr depth, not feel it change yu" and a few years back in a letter to me when i was referring to the things i was writing then as ideopomes

does it help to name yur pomes at all, bp, theyre there grown, the name is possibly for the filers, th staff cards, like "sweet william", or hollyhock, whether theyre ideopomes or whatever, they are still being there, and it doesnt become an ideopome rather than a cap poetry poem just because theyre called one or th other, they surely always become what they are

it has always been one of bissetts concerns & indeed the concern of all the poets involved in what ive already referred to elsewhere as the Vancouver toronto niagara Cleveland grouping it has always been their concern to present the perceptual system the way it wants to present itself what this means is no manifesto declaring certain items as no longer fit for inclusion as poetry but rather a sensitivity to the moving spirit which manifests itself as language & allowing it to show itself thru you in what ever way seems natural to it thus the broad scope of bissetts work the wide variation in terms of how the poem that is inside him ends up outside him

bissetts visual notation encompasses six different approaches

1. visual organization
2. spelling
3. run-ons & combinations
4. atomization
5. overlays
6. hand drawn or written pieces

i would like to look at this first of all from a purely visual point of view that is to say the poem as an ideogramme since this too is part of bissetts concern but keeping always in mind its basis for bissett in sound

the beginning of written language is the sign a symbol agreed upon by everybody to mean the same thing the first signs were pictorial & representative the ox was symbolized by the drawing of an ox and then gradually thru constant usage by only its head the drawing of which soon became simplified & stylized…. bissett begins at the point where language has become abstract symbol & attempts to move backwards … to arrive at his conclusions….

all art has moved toward a reexamination of basic materials what too many people have seen as a disintegrative tendency in art BECAUSE THEY SEE MAKING PRETTY PICTURES OR TELLING NICE STORIES OR THINKING BIG THOTS AS THE END PRODUCT is in fact an attempt to regain the magic to rediscover the basic tools….

visual organization like we have been discussing often leads directly into word combinations & the running together of words & phrases this sets up areas within the poem that lack logical connections areas of stress in which the brain strains to make the imaginative jump & fill in the gaps bissett has left the effect is similar to that obtained by sitting in a room where dozens of people carry on as many conversations the message (if you wish it) is the lack of real communication in the way we use language that this is a concern of bissett's is obvious from such poems as "Nuclear Circular" where he writes

clearly stating his own fear that he will be unable to communicate to those people it is most important he communicate with he has made it even clearer in two subsequent pieces at one point in Lost Angel Mining Company in a moment of anger he writes

yr friends tryin to bring yu down, always putting yu on trips, their jive comments, meddling in where yr aiming to be. that it strengthens the species all th gossip and bullshit, if yu can survive it yu can go further, what might strengthen th species etc is for peopul to mind their own business. for what appears to be is only misdirection, boring data.

& in a poem published in Tamarack 56

spookd by how i dont really
care anyway nor do my
friends i mean how

can yu particularly
care, after all this hand
waving's gone down, done
nothing, except beg for

what is necessary

but for bissett in his particular quest the moments of despair & anger alternate with the moments of ecstasy in two poems written almost five years apart bissett shows us the problem as he sees it in the first from his first book We Sleep Inside Each Other All he says

the albatross here is language & the i man for man has tied language to him & killed it thru divorcing it from sound thru fear of his own voice the real use of his own voice guilt over the use of the power that is there if this interpretation seems far fetched then listen to what bissett says here in "Beyond Even Faithful Legends" a poem written years later

Patterns, geometries, don't step on th cracks, yul
break whose back, there it is, mothr or who, those choices to
me child, help, help th children children destroy even
those patterns yu place upon their undrstandings, i
once thot …, or my childish attempt to see
a suggested pattern, tho i probably that way got it all
wrong, o, if theres any way

out of th programmd albatross take it loves

for bissett the way out of this intolerable situation is the perception of the organic totality the path of chant & magic….

no reason to believe any one else's version of where yu are. what is constant, th radically changing flow yu are a tiny part of mysteriously a small polishd stone sumtimes a croaking frog sumtimes evolvd spirit. what are we. we are on this earth to love each other, it is a garden, let us play, fighting janguls the antennae.

patience and love bring yu thru th peaceful opening to harmony, it isn't peaceful just cause yu want it to be. be where there is already peace, this conveys moving around sum.

(Lost Angel Mining Company)

sumtimes it seems yu just hav only to find yur place in the wheel, and then everything is allright, an' that yur place is anywhere that yu can accept it being there what yu are anyways doing

everything alive part of the same energy but sum get cut off guess everyone is cut off sumtime where how we have to only spread the energy to all, but like sum whun who is hungry just wants to eat, to do any thing fancy like spreading energy

(undated letter)

here bissett states that social conditions interfere with our perception of this totality constantly he is torn between what he sees as the need for violent social action to help the starving homeless oppressed people he sees around him & the perception that violence breeds more violence & distracts from the pursual of magic in a poem published in an issue of Blew Ointment titled "Nerve Gas part II" he states "for th journey is both higher nd lower than we may think and widr nd hardr when its even easy than evr"

and in "Arrows of Flowers"

so hard to speak, as th changes do not occur
in words only but in th flesh, and its annointing
is confused with th admixtures of words
and society, striking imperfect balances

the two have not come together for him "yeah, if it werent for life, i wudint need a witchdoctor" ("Our Friends In Jail") the two streams are there the american take-over of Canadian resources surrounded by violence to respond with violence

how duz it work

me ium gonna start carrying a gun
all th time i dont get that one at all
("th Earth Lantern")

the duality is constant bissett's recognition that you have to "believe in th positive energy sumtimes" ("th Earth Lantern") & too the recognition that there are forces around you working to distract you from what may be the major work

and in "Looking for th Lammas" which follows "th Earth Lantern" in S The Story I To the opening line states "th ancient lord of th universe asks yu to be" & then

the order & type of bissetts most recent publications is in itself significant here for what i am saying Lost Angel Mining Company was followed by Liberating Skies the purest concrete poetry bissett had yet done page after page of chant overlays this was followed by S The Story I To which ends with these lines

watch out for the invadrs who take over yr wires yr media yr schools who announce whats next / as th black top is rolld out all ovr yr earth all th way to th concentration / camp the robot ville ofth mind, th drive-in, th newstand, even tellin yu its good / for yu poets too sure / know thr th steam roller on yr face

("Love of Life, th 49th Parallel")

this was followed by Blew Trewz another book of pure concrete bissett is alternating the moments of ecstasy of magic with the screams of rage against what is going down around him nowhere is the dilemma so clearly stated as in "Hey Yu"

the parallel lines are the two areas of concern the social revolution & the magical awareness & yet they meet they meet in his poetry & the centre of poetry is the spinning of words the nets cast out to catch the moment "words words / the holy spider / is yr heart" they meet in his poetry & yet do not meet since they are parallel bissett speaks again & again from the heart of this dilemma

what it smells like th burning fire
of yr soul tunnels thru th mountains
like meat like yolk
as precious thots
birthd by th union
of th lightning
flashes that blind
yr will

and th children sleep
soft til dawn all
around them th jackals creep

o love past play past memory
let th children be
let th children be
("Circles in th Sun")

what i have been trying to show here is bissetts immense concern with addressing a people & being heard within this concern is his constant awareness that old uses of language are part of what have trapped us & thus he seeks new exits new ways of using language "So David sd that is, I am th picture. Why." when those lines were written bissett had perceived that man was the ideogramme that at the heart of language is or should be a human concern yet it puzzled him the further he moves into magic into perceiving language as part of the totality the less he needs somebody outside of him to answer that question S The Story I To is his way of saying that the single letter is the story s is the story that this is what he does that he is the story he is the alphabet & with the shock of recognition goes the despair & anger about the way the world has been played with used for selfish ends as language has again & again as all parts of the totality have

it is to regain this sense of the totality that bissett has gone into the primitive elements of language into chant into insistence into the approaches he uses to putting the poem on the page

his use of word combinations & the running together of phrases that I discussed earlier leads into another area of bissett's approach to visual organization his interest in atomization by breaking up words so that they lose their recognizable surface & throwing the emphasis on to the elements of the word bissett causes areas of tension to be set up inside the poem that are the reverse of those created by his run-ons & combinations in the latter one attempts to separate the recognizable words from the mass he has created & in the former to piece them together from the fragments presented there is nothing new in any of these methods breaking up words &/or combining them is the way we gain new words & enrich our language by doing this within the body of his poems bissett is working in the way william carlos williams suggested would be necessary in order to rid the language of staleness

it is in spelling that bissett makes the language most his own bissett is one of the few modern poets consistently & systematically to change the spelling of a large number of words to suit his own purposes the difference between "come" & "cum" is not in the meaning of the word or in the sound but in the reaction of the reader who gains an entirely different aura of sense reading it reading it we recognize the word "come" but recognize it also as being different from the word we are familiar with the difference is interpreted by the eye in terms of the sound in fact bissett has altered the sonic space that the word occupies visually he has put his own interpretation on the word & made the language come alive for both himself & the reader we can see here how the visual & the aural concerns are really one & the same….

the advantage for the poet of hand written texts is direct contact with the page typewritten poems involve direct contact with the keys & secondarily the imprinting of your poems on paper in that sense a typed poem is almost published already you have the experience of type right there in bissetts conception of an organic universe the hand drawn poems which sometimes pass over into drawings or paintings & the hand written chants like "Windows in th Straw" which appears at the end of Liberating Skies come closest to direct transmission in the drawn poems there is the central concern of the ideogramme & the mandala both objects which contain the poet "i am th picture" he creates a sign which is meaningless in terms of our language which has a visual meaning rather than a verbal or auditory one & is able to work at a level of communication where each encounter is fresh & exciting & forces us to come forth with new unstereotyped responses here as in his overlays he comes close to a pure iconography & tho the link to chant is more obvious in the overlays the link to magic in terms of the sign is most obvious in his hand drawn pieces

the hand written chants are direct muscular transmission of the chant instinct the same phrase written over and over and over the emphasis shifting from line to line in terms of the rise & fall of the letter the slight shifts in shape & thickness of lines in the typewritten overlays (most notable in Liberating Skies & Blew Trewz) bissett translates into visual terms the sonic space the poem occupies by heavily overlaying line after line of a chant the shifts in emphases occur in terms of a blurring out of the previous line by the line being typed over it not perfectly but slightly down from it so that part of the previous line appears above the next line building up in some areas into a total blurring of the line & then its gradual reemergence into legibility it is a visual equivalent of a sonic space

now what i have been doing here is looking at the devices bissett uses to notate the poem i have been looking at the visual devices & seeing them in terms of their visuality keeping in mind always that for bissett there is this underlying concern of the ideogram of the man at the centre of language & this mans presence in terms of the sound of his voice in language every device bissett uses bends towards an understanding of language & its uses a seeking for exits from the death it has so long carried with it by merging it again with the totality

in an unpublished essay titled "The New Geomancers" steve mccaffery places bissetts work in a clear line of historical succession

bissett in a context

william blake: everything that lives is holy the grammatically contained word can do no justice to these living things the word must be the object to survive the object must be the word in order to survive

william collins: ode to evening via palgrave a perceptual experience through language becomes a totally bodily experience vocabulary syntax as muscle collins words are collins sinews

Christopher smart: penetration through the word behind it into word events the ultimate fusion of language and the body repetition as this determination to get it back there smart seeing poetry as adoration trapped in merely verbalistic praise poetry becoming bodily action physical nakedity inseparable from verbal perspicacity read his biography as a truly symbolic document and a perfect critical analogy

henri chopin: la poème c'est moi instance of the single vision….

symons in his book Man's Presumptious Brain refers to the fact that man is evolving towards a point of totally denying the emotional life bissett outlined this trap a long time ago in a poem called "The Body" in which he pointed out that any system eventually grows more powerful than the people using it and takes on an independent life of its own,

The largeness of THE BODY would increase
and diffuse hopelessly the initial self-
betrayals invited aroused to sustain it.
As a consequence, the belief in self,
in character would drop away behind
the larger movement of the General Body.

this is not a finding of the self in a larger community but rather the surrender of self thru despair to a less obvious conformity the traps here are subtle as we have already seen the language itself carries the death inside it in this same poem bissett outlines an avenue of escape he chose to use and the reasons for his attempt to return to the root elements of both the written and aural language

and yet bissett continues it is not an easy quest…. bissett is aware the path he has chosen thru language is not always easy for the very people he wants to reach "he complained there was no plot nd went out slamming th door befor he got to it." this is in The Lost Angel Mining Company and it is followed by

close yr eyes and see a procession of holy grateful spirits weaving thru th illusions of light and shadow seeking places to make offering loves as green as rich golden fires within th one heart spinning th gathring stories thru th floating grain

& a little later

who knows what it means, theres no time like th future, but yu hear the notes sound th beat, yuve herd it ovr nd ovr again, in yr heart, th furnace at th centre boiling lava, th stars measurd radiance, th tempo of th changes, this person cums to see yu, what th exchange might be, yu go now without reason, but th time is for it, an invisible move but changing tides yu don't initiate yu are air earth fire water th fabric and vessel who expresses being

th obscurity forces were kept busy how close th light house came was. also found alive and well, words can't tell, generous and brave, none of us knows what is to come. ive seen this picture already and there appears not to be any othr.

the role of prophet or seer sits uneasy on him & yet he feels he has something to say

thru it all he does continue and thru it all the continuing re-examination of language of the forms of being the page as a visual sonic field the poem as an extension of the body the insistence of what is inside you and how it changes from moment to moment thru chant

And for th word offering
remember me
according to th language
of every peopul
("Of Th Land Divine Service")

bissett is seeking for some new footing in the void of falling & not without hope for as he says somewhat to his own surprise in "We Need The Setting"