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 bourgeois world of literary criticism as little more than a wild man or a freak.

Bissett published more than fifteen books in the sixties, and so far in the seventies has published ten more. His first significant recognition outside of the underground literary world in which he works and lives, however, was the publication in 1972 by the House of Anansi Press of a selected Bissett, Nobody Owns th Earth. This was followed quickly by his inclusion in Eli Mandel's certifying anthology, Poets of Contemporary Canada (1972). Neither book, however, recognizes Bissett on his own anarchic terms. The Anansi selected poems, edited by Margaret Atwood and Dennis Lee, is a "Bissett methodized"—Bissett represented by his most tractable and accessible material. Much of the flavour of a real Bissett publication—that created by his use of smudged and broken typefaces, varying page sizes, one-of-a-kind crayon sketches and collages, and consciously obscure or sentimental material is absent.

Bissett has been a one-man literary happening, almost impossible to contain in a single book. He is an exciting sound poet—particularly in his chants based on west coast Indian material; this part of his work can be sampled through his record Awake in th Red Desert. He is an innovator in concrete or visual poetry. His most interesting work here has been his use of the dimensions of the page as a principal element, and his occasional transformation of the page into a single alphabetic and orthographic tapestry. Bissett is also an accomplished graphic artist, with a recognizably unique style in both collage and pen-and-ink sketching. In addition, he has been an important west coast editor, working through his cavalierly named Blew Ointment Press and Blew Ointment magazine to preserve and advance the careers of numerous Vancouver writers including Judith Copithorne, Maxine Gadd, Gerry Gilbert, and Bertrand Lachance. In all of these activities, as well as in his day-to-day life, he has been politically active, attempting to disturb the complacent, enrage the dogmatic, and obstruct the mechanical and the unjust whether in literature or in the streets.

Informing all of Bissett's action has been a mystical and religious view of the world. Behind our own unreliable world of death, war, and persecution, Bissett sees a transcendent and immutable one in which pure joy, energy, and spontaneous form exclude the petty boundaries and restrictions of our philistine and puritanical culture. More Blakean than Emersonian, this other world of "th endless sun, the rose in th forhead", can become visible to us during incantation, prayer, or dream. At moments of extreme intensity—drug experience, sexual orgasm—a person can enter completely into this world of eternal condition. Many of Bissett's poems celebrate physical love in which the body becomes a "tempul burning" and opens the way to complete escape from materiality and temporality. Many other poems are religious chants—

"holy day is due holy / day is due …"—ostensibly designed to induce mystic feeling.

Because of the Platonic overtones of these poems, their diction superficially appears extremely limited. The dominant part of speech is the noun; most nouns are from a narrow elemental range—tree, earth, fire, wind, water, sky, sun, moon, blood, heart (in some books by Bissett such a list would comprise 80% of the nouns). They are nearly always unmodified. But these limitations are deliberately chosen by Bissett in his attempt to write of an unqualified, elemental, and pure visionary world—a world distinct from ours in its lack of categories, pluralities, divergencies, in its consisting only of elemental substance. Bissett's idiosyncratic quasi-phonetic spelling—yu for you, th for the, tempul for temple—is both a similar kind of simplification and a symbolic act of social rebellion. It is meant to indicate a sensibility that prefers cosmic clarity to the vagaries and stupidities of earthly convention, and is successful in doing this. To Bissett, the rules of grammar, church, academy, and state are all equally pernicious conspiracies to imprison the human spirit.

A major part of Bissett's work is his poetry of political and social castigation. This poetry is more accessible to the conventionally pragmatic reader than is the mystical verse, but most clearly has its origin in Bissett's mystic vision. The poet who yearns for heaven lives in hell—a hell not only of corporeality and plurality but of human deceit, brutality, exploitation, and petty distinction, a hell in which the poet must cynically inquire "were yu normal today did yu screw society". In these poems Bissett presents himself persecuted by police narcotic squads, incarcerated in a provincial prison, or mortally endangered by power-hungry doctors, psychiatrists, and bureaucrats. All of such poems have the rare quality in contemporary poetry of total authenticity. Bissett is no detached middle-class social critic; he has lived and continues to live on the streets of hell, and has the artistic power to cpnvey this experience in its fullness to the reader.

The two sides to Bissett's poetry cannot be fully understood in separation. One is the mystic's hope, the other is his horror at what still surrounds him. Together they make him one of the major voices in new Canadian writing. Despite the slowness of his recognition, it is clear that of all the new poets of the past two decades Bissett is definitely one of the most stubbornly and self-confidently unique talents. Although the idea must be repugnant to him, he has already assured himself an important place in Canada's literary history.