"Frivolity and ecstasy are the twin poles between which play moves."

—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

In some three dozen books of poetry published since 1966, bill bissett has often seemed intent on making a virtue of disorder. If the redundancy of much of his work is undeniable, so is its great variety. Challenging all manner of authority, literary and otherwise, he has mounted an attack on convention that at times appears nihilistic to the point of stunting his considerable artistry. Nevertheless, there is a vital consistency in his theories, forms and themes. The most idiosyncratic and the most ideological of his poems reflect a visionary writer whose achievement is already an impressive one.

While bissett's poetic is fairly obvious in many of his volumes, two are expressly addressed to questions of language and style: Rush / What Fuckan Theory (1971) and Words in th Fire (1972). The first of these is a book subverted by its own attitudes. As an assertion of bissett's idea that relationships such as hierarchy, cause-effect sequences, and linear writing are repressive, Rush proclaims its defiance by remaining determinedly incoherent. The verbal chaos is extreme; only occasionally are there passages of striking intellectual or lyrical interest. Almost all the important points in bissett's aesthetic view which are diffused, obscured and repeated elsewhere in the book, are tellingly concentrated in one poem, "Poetry dusint have to be," which presents some of his most persistent themes. He declares that poetry should be free from any prescriptions of subject; indeed, like the most elementary child's play, it can do "nothing well." Nevertheless, as the bulk of this manifesto demonstrates, poetry can very well be about political and social issues of the utmost consequence—and much of bissett's own work is. The idea that there is a close connection between rules of language and political oppression (one of bissett's central convictions) occurs in the third part of the poem, and in the fourth he touches on another of his main themes: life in a primitive, natural terrain. In conclusion he suggests that the poet may be a medium for the utterance of perceptions which elude his conscious understanding:

writing pomes can be abt many things
can be abt nothing but what it itself is
writing pomes in a way is longr than we are
and what we can know writing pomes
is also th voice uv ths things speaking thru us

"Poetry dusint have to be" is typical in form of those of bissett's poems which develop as predominantly discursive works, as distinguished from the visceral chants and visual designs at which he also excels. While he eschews conventional grammar and punctuation in such poems, they give an impression of copious vitality, of perceptions rendered articulate through the rhythms of phrase, line and section—or as bissett would have it, through the rhythms of breathing.

Words in th Fire (1972) uses this discursive mode to develop "anothr / study uv langwage" with much greater lucidity than Rush. In this series of semi-continuous meditations, bissett sees himself as participating in a "langwage revolution" which, however, appears to him to be faltering at the time he writes this poem. One aspect of this revolution, he suggests, is the wide availability of typewriters, copiers, small presses a cultural phenomenon which subverts authority systems. Among bissett's ideals is that of an organic principle in poetic structures:

This notion is hardly revolutionary, unless we extend the history of the revolution back at least as far as [William] Wordsworth and [Samuel] Coleridge. However, the radical practices of bissett and some of his contemporaries are almost unprecedented. While the history of twentieth-century poetry is in large part an account of the revolt against nineteenth-century stanzas, rhythm and rhyme schemes, concrete poets in our time have carried the revolt further, in their suspicion of basic semantic conventions like grammar, spelling and linear printing, which they regard as repressive systems. Bissett stresses the importance in his kind of poetry, of sound, especially of language as spoken, as opposed to language as it is taught in schools. He seeks to present:

Bissett's "revolutionary" spelling is conceived as a political act, intended to embody the values of phonetic simplification and vocal authenticity. "Correct" expression is in his view elitist, one more self-perpetuating device of the privileged classes, and one more restriction on the creative spirit. The anatomy of his books reflects this attitude: variations in the size of pages, inserts of advertisements and items clipped from magazines and newspapers, crayon drawings, inverted pages, pages of different colors—chiefly pastels in green, pink, grey, and blue, print that ranges from pica type to Olde English lettering, handwritten poems—his methods of defying standardization seem inexhaustible.

Bissett praises the potential of poetry to stir our faculties and involve readers in something akin to the act of poetic creation, an experience directly in contrast to the chief "recreation" of our age, television, which is generally manipulative rather than stimulating. Or as bissett himself says with more point, in "radiashun collaps":

cant watch tv no mor man
ths tv's gotta go or me go
cant watch it baby how cum
it needs to be watchd
all th time cant lord
cant no way lord ths tv
just a pile of shit(in Th High Green Hill)

This is not to say that bissett is unaware of the power of words to deceive and subjugate. His enthusiasm for language as delight, as freedom, as discovery, is equalled by his suspicion of language as an instrument of tyranny. As early as Th Jinx Ship nd Othr Trips (1966), he is quite clear about the power of language to constrict and damage our lives. Fundamental to bissett's work is his conviction that because poetry issues from minds which are continually conditioned by their environment, and view of poetry must take account of the social, the political, indeed the physical milieu in which it emerges. Hence Words in th Fire includes passages on the urbanization of modern consciousness, on discrimination against Canadian poets, the inequities of book distribution, Canadian complicity in the war in Vietnam, and on the Americanization of Canada. For bissett, political empire is intimately associated with language and thought control. Similarly, literary criticism is a form of power politics: "tastes get stratified nd start to stand for / what is permitted to get thru."

In the interest of "liberating" language from traditional poetic forms, bissett has explored its visual and aural qualities: the former is the route to concrete poetry, the latter leads to sound poetry. An extremely protean phenomenon, concrete poetry is hard to define with any precision: generally, it exploits the strictly visual properties of words while making more or less use of their semantic content. I think that bissett's "am or," from Awake in th Red Desert (1968), is a paradigm of concrete. Semantically, "am" expresses the fundamental human condition of isolated subjectivity, and "or" raises the question of an alternative state: can one's loneliness be eased? Yes, in fact the solution to human isolation is love: "amor." And the culmination of love is reached at the end of the poem in the form of sexual communion popularly known as "sixty-nine." Visually, the stark columns of "ams" and "ors" may suggest the monotonous isolation of two individuals. The fact that these columns merge into the cluster of "69's" and the fact that in contrast to the columns, most of the "69's" are linked, reinforces my "semantic" reading. The 69's are also a clue to another visual dimension of the poem. If one inverts the page, the phallic shape becomes instantly apparent, accounting for the notch at the top of the figure. Righting the page, we now perceive the figure as a female emblem as well. (The fact that the shape of the poem is male upside down and female rightside up, corresponds to the physical positions of the lovers as they engage in "sixty-nine.") This is at once a love poem and an erotic sketch, altogether a work of considerable cleverness and perhaps of some emotional value, as far as it touches our own sense of loneliness and our knowledge or our hope of love.

The variety of bissett's concrete poems continually challenges his readers' abilities to respond to the unusual. In "am or," the visual and semantic elements are almost in balance. As the proportion of semantic content in concrete poetry diminishes, the form approaches that of the purely visual arts—indeed, bissett is a graphic artist of considerable talent. One of his favorite methods is collage. Towards the end of the Pass th Food Release th Spirit Book (1973), we come upon a page on which a panel evidently clipped from a comic book is placed amid four snapshots arranged to form a frame and background. The cartoon depicts two girls fleeing on horse-back from a looming tyrannosaurus which has just emerged from the jungle. Each of the photographs shows a modern high-rise office or apartment building. The only words in the collage are those of one of the girls, whose speech-balloon says, "Go, Samiel" (We can't be sure whether she's addressing her horse or the other girl.) Commentary: the collage invites a comparison of the tyrannosaurus with the rampant high-rises of our concrete jungles, modern monsters which threaten to devour us. The monstrous qualities of the high-rises—their dehumanized geometry and the standardized compartments (apart/ments) into which they separate people—are suggested by contrast. In the photographs only a solitary human figure appears, so tiny as to be nearly imperceptible, dwarfed at the entrance to his building; the comic strip, however, is vivid with creatures and companions as well as with terror. The whole effect is deliberately hokey, but nevertheless makes a point about the tyranny wrought by technologized environments. Such work can also remind us that the conceptual content of concrete poetry is not contingent on its semantic content. The pictorial symbols and many of the figures in bissett's drawings are full of meaning, and often enrich and complement the themes of his more traditional poems.

One obvious way to reduce the semantic content of a concrete poem is to keep the words to a minimum. Another way is to repeat a particular word or group of words until our sense of their conceptual meaning disappears. This is a primary technique of sound poetry but it also has a function in printed works. In a poem from What (1974), as the semantic import of the word evaporates, our attention is attracted by its concrete properties—the shapes and patterns of letters:

Traditional writing tends to abstract us from the phenomenal world; a number of bissett's concrete poems seek to reverse this tendency by insisting on the shapes and spaces of print and of calligraphy.

Like conventional poetry, concrete ranges from the utterly simple to the highly complex, from merely formal designs which can be appreciated at a glance, to collages of words and shapes which yield sophisticated meanings. And like conventional poetry, it ranges from the lightest, most sportive poems, to works of profound moral import. The former seems to be more generally the case: more often concrete poetry amuses and delights than it informs and instructs. It would be more faithful to the spirit of the genre to dispense with the critical term "work" and to speak of artplay. Bissett's What Poetiks (1967) is a series of childish scrawls, bad jokes, elementary puns—a treatment of language as simple visual and semantic counters. IBM / Saga uv th Relees uv Human Spirit from Compuewterr Funckshuns (no date) plays concrete games with the alphabet, chiefly through discerning pictures in the shapes of letters, and through word-association. What (1974) is a brown envelope containing loose pages which can be shuffled into any sequence. Among the poems is "vowl man," a human figure constructed of a's, e's, i's, o's and u's. Other pages present more or less recognizable shapes built out of numerous "what's"—there are a building, a table, a barbecue and I think a handsaw. There are a couple of dim photographs of what appears to be lovemaking, and there is an introductory poem which needn't, naturally, appear at the beginning of the sequence. The title word is a brilliant stroke. As a query, "what" expresses precisely our attitude as we encounter each poem; as an assertion, it quite rightly indicates that each poem is no more nor less than itself. What? what. That's what.

As does concrete, sound poetry moves from relatively familiar uses of language (recitation, song), to works devoid of conceptual meaning: wails, hums and chants in which the voice is used strictly as an instrument of sound, speaking only to our emotions, not at all to our intellect. The most satisfactory experience of bissett's sound poetry is, of course, a live performance by the man himself. Listening to bissett on a record player or tape deck is similar to watching a rock concert on television: one feels that the performance is unnaturally packaged and controlled, and misses a vital sense of immediacy and of communal experience. Very little of bissett's sound poetry eschews the semantic element altogether, though most of his auditors will respond to only sound qualities in those chants ("shun da kalensha ta da lee") which are, according to Frank Davey, "based on west coast Indian material." "Take th river into yr heart," is a typical section of bissett's chant, "The water falls in yr mind nd yu get wet tooo," which is printed in Liberating Skies (1969), and recorded on the LP that accompanies Medicine My Mouth's on Fire (1974). Perhaps the line can be understood in several ways, but it is certainly an exhortation to transcend oneself. The repetition which characterizes bissett's chanting frequently acquires ritual and sacramental overtones; indeed, much of his sound poetry ultimately amounts to a religious use of language and is closely related to the sacred vision which surges through such volumes as Polar Bear Hunt (1972) and Th High Green Hill (1972). As it is chanted, the line undergoes a variety of spontaneous vocal modulations. Its printed version can illustrate another facet of bissett's sound poetry: the typewritten "notation" for the work renders a concrete poem of considerable visual beauty. Such "tapestries" of words approach another of bissett's art forms: designs created by the typewriter which have no cognitive meaning, and whose charms are purely visual.

Often the puzzling forms which bissett's work takes have the effect of slowing down our experience of the poetry. Perhaps this is one of the fundamental virtues of his technique: it forces us to assume a more leisurely pace, to enter into the spirit of play, of reverence, of creation itself; it resists the "expert" response of programmed analysis and cataloguing. Indeed a number of concrete poets have stated that a primary aim of their work is involvement of the reader in completing or contributing to the poem's meaning in much greater measure than conventional poetry demands. Thus Claus Bremer, in an explanation of one of his poems: "this arrangement is intended to arouse curiosity, to reveal something, and then again to become obscure; to arouse the reader's curiosity, to reveal something to him, and then again confront him with himself…. Concrete poetry gives us no results. It yields a process of discovery. It is motion. Its motion ends in different readers in different ways." Much of bissett's work is intriguing in this way and gratifies our efforts to appreciate it.

There are, however, numerous poems and passages throughout the spate of volumes by bissett, which for me lack any aesthetic merit. In poems such as "run tonight" from Pass th Food Release th Spirit Book (1973), I can find neither the exuberance nor the beauty which are outstanding qualities elsewhere in his work. I remarked that as a revolutionary writer, bissett seeks to shatter the conventional orders of language, and that some of his most vital work is a consequence of this enterprise. Poems like "run tonight," though, strike me as applications of his theories about language rather than explorations of the medium itself.

This self-conscious effect is reminiscent of Dada and surrealist art; indeed many of bissett's poems which baffle attempts to "read" them, echo the Dada interest, noted by Nahma Sandrow, in "dissociation and negation, in mocking with obscene gestures society and intellect and art, all illusions of an era too pigheaded to confront its chaos." In "run tonight," disordered structure and violation of coherence are themselves the point. While such work may have a purpose of sorts, it fails to realize the aesthetic possibilities of either concrete or "trad" poetry. It has neither formal nor intellectual appeal, and seems to me essentially the printed equivalent of noise. Too often one feels that bissett is merely giving the raspberry to an especially pedantic fifth-rate English teacher he may have encountered in grammar school. It's worth noting that bissett himself is quite willing to make judgements about the quality of his poetry. Though he frequently urges us to let things, and poems, "be themselves," he acknowledges in a preface to Sunday Work (1969) that "sum uv ths pomes aren't ordinarily worth publishing or writing," and the volume Living with th Vishyun (1974) begins with this invitation:

Alternatively, perhaps works such as "run tonight" can be regarded as raw material, the soupy verbal matrix from which moments of startling lyrical clarity emerge as we read through a bissett volume. By his own account, poetry is an abandonment of repressive rationality and ego distortions, an utterance of the "true" discoveries of untrammelled perception. He produces great wordfloods, evidently on the assumption that undirected consciousness will issue in something worthy of print. But it may also issue in the banal and the unintelligible, poems equally as bad as those "made up" by the excessively self-conscious poet. Voyagers through strange seas of thought and language risk shipwreck as they seek new worlds, and numerous of bissett's poems seem to me debris. Even so, the voyage is often worth the risk.

Though much of bissett's art is innovative, much is also fairly traditional in form, once one looks past superficial novelties of spelling and grammar. His versatility and vision overflow the forms of concrete and often issue in poetry that is both fluent and cogent. Notwithstanding his misgivings about doctrines and his diatribes against the tyranny of rational meaning, much of his work is full of meaning, and much is "message" poetry of a distinctly didactic orientation. He has produced many fine poems of a traditional sort: long meditations, brief lyrics, satiric narratives. These are more accessible than much of his experimental work, and it is probably no coincidence that one of his more conventional volumes has been praised as one of his best. In his review of Pomes for Yoshi (1972), Stephen Scobie confronts the question of the nebulous relation between spontaneity and order in bissett's poetic, and he makes a strong case for bissett's ability as a craftsman of poetry, in the traditional sense. As Scobie points out, "in some of his longer satirical poems—I'm thinking especially of 'Th' Emergency Ward' and 'Killer Whale' the pretence of the poem's being an unadulterated recital of facts is surely just a pretence. These poems practice a kind of reticence, an ironic understatement, a refusal to comment which is in the end far more effective than any actual comment could have been …". Scobie rightly singles out for admiration a genre in which bissett excels, the "realistic" personal anecdote which becomes an avenue of social criticism. Bissett's narrative versatility extends also to visionary romance and fantasy in poems such as "let me tell yu a story of how they met" in Polar Bear Hunt (1972), but I wish to follow up Scobie's judgement of "Killer Whale," from Lost Angel Mining Company (1969), as a particularly fine example of the realistic narratives….

[This] is a personal anecdote that implies a sweeping view of the impersonal present, together with a sense of fundamental values. The poet recounts a hitch-hiking episode with his lady, martina, during which they look at some captive whales. Their bad day becomes an indictment of our culture's bad times. The prevalent causes of tyranny and constriction in our lives dominate the environment the poem describes: corporate and bureaucratic institutions like MacMillan-Blodell, like the legal system which has "busted" the speaker—presumably for a marijuana offence, like the official policy which precludes charity in government employees (an attitude echoed in the indifference of the attendants to the suffering whales). Similarly, details such as bus schedules, phone booths and plastic bags, suggest the technologizing of our lives which threatens on occasion to overturn our sense of freedom. The whales are a magnificient embodiment of the vitality and beauty which our civilization assaults, and they also represent a natural community of creatures which contrasts with the social isolation of the human figures in the poem. Contrary to the generally spirited character of bissett's writing, "Killer Whale" is stamped by an almost Arnoldian despondency about psychic exhaustion inflicted by the contingencies and shocks of modern life:

after th preliminary hearing, martina
and me and th hot sun, arguing
our way thru th raspberry bushes
onto a bus headin for Van, on th ferry
analyzing th hearing and th bust, how
th whole insane trip cuts at our life
giving us suspicions and knowledge
stead of innocence and th bus takes
off without us from th bloody B.C.
government ferry—I can't walk too good
with a hole in my ankle and all why
we didn't stay with our friends back
at th farm—destined for more places
changes to go thru can feel th pull
of that heavy in our hearts and in th air

At least bissett and martina muddle through the disorder and anguish here, and reach their immediate goal, Vancouver, for what it's worth. Bissett's skill at relating idiom, circumstantial detail, and an implicit vision of our world, is obvious in works such as "Killer Whale."

These works can also demonstrate that poetry need not be formally radical to undertake inquiries or discoveries. In Pomes for Yoshi (1972), we observe the speaker assessing and reassessing his thoughts and behavior, measuring his feelings against his principles—doing, in short, what good poets have always done in exploring the paradoxes of sexual love. This book is so clearly the issue of an articulate consciousness seeking a realization of its experience in language. And this is the point at which bissett's "trad" poems intersect with his experimental writing. A number of his more homogeneous volumes also illustrate the questing attitude—perhaps "groping" would be more precise—which informs his work. Volumes such as Pomes for Yoshi, Th First Sufi Line (1973), and Yu Can Eat It at th Opening (1974), are serially arranged: they are flowing congeries of ideas, perceptions, moods, which taken individually may well form satisfactory brief poems, but which also body forth a larger meditative context. Living with th Vishyun (1974) is similar, and different: a collection of relatively spare and cryptic poems which often give the impression of memoranda from the poet to himself.

I have used the term "realistic" in speaking of those poems by bissett which reflect, and reflect upon, his experience in a world which we recognize as the familiar context of our daily lives. Such realism, especially in its comic and satirical perspectives, is one way bissett controls, amplifies, and makes compelling the visionary intervals in his work. Here I would suggest that bissett has affinities with those writers over the past two centuries whose work is impelled by a dialectic of irony and lyricism. Writers such as [William] Blake, [Thomas] Carlyle, [Herman] Melville and—closer to bissett's own time and space—Leonard Cohen, have sustained the most profound lyrical visions through an equally powerful sense of the comic. Their work testifies to a peculiar feature of modern history: that glimpses of sublimity can be achieved only within a frame of irony. With these writers bissett shares, variously: a wish to exhort and inspire; an undertaking to express and interpret a whole epoch and culture; a distrust of reductive interpretation and a subversion of linear conventions; a taste for both epigrammatic brilliance and verbal luxuriance; and certainly not least, a delight in playing with language, an obsession with wordcoining, puns, jests, and a relish for sound and rhythm. Some of these qualities, especially the lyrical genius which complements bissett's realism, are concentrated in a poem from Awake in th Red Desert (1968):

song composed just after the alarm clock
before going to social assistance

who was that in th red boat
riding down sugar lane

who was that in th red boat
riding down sugar lane

who did yu see in th red boat
riding down sugar lane

who cud yu hear in th red boat
never to hear again

who cud yu hear in th red boat
never to hear again

Commentaries on poems like this one inevitably risk the appearance of millstones appended to ponies. I think, nevertheless, that "song" illustrates precisely my point about an ecstatic vision within an ironic frame. Some of the most crucial Romantic perspectives are here: the discovery of primordial glories in dreams and childlike imagination, and the loss of this magic upon awakening to the world of experience. The rhythms are those of children's chanting games or ritual incantation, qualities which permeate many of the visionary poems in Th High Green Hill (1972). But before looking further at the world conjured up in the course of bissett's song, I want to consider the world referred to in its title.

Bissett's criticism of social and political structures is as radical as his subversion of literary conventions. Indeed, he believes they are fundamentally related. As a social critic he is representative of the counter-culture, that conspicuous if nebulous rebellion which blossomed in the sixties against traditional North American mores and institutions. Bissett locates the center of social corruption in the United States and identifies "Amerika" as the source and symbol of heartless, devouring modernism, the Moloch against which [Allen] Ginsberg raised his howl in the fifties. Bissett's treatments of this theme range from relatively ironic, dramatic works like "Killer Whale" to jeremiads like "LOVE OF LIFE, th 49th PARALLELL," in Nobody Owns th Earth (1971), in which sides are quickly chosen up and a torrent of accusation is loosed against the invasion by "plastik" American culture which (bissett believes) is destroying some kind of tutelary spiritual presence in the Canadian landscape. The outrage that vibrates through the long lines of this poem seems to quicken its tempo as the indictment surges forward. The repulsive imagery of American "power / sadism" is brilliantly chosen. Though the rhetorical violence of the poem makes me suspect the strict accuracy of the historical view proposed, it is clearly intended, like "Howl," as a rallying cry for rebels, not as a scholarly investigation.

The political affinities of the counter-culture are with socialism, in the priority it gives to collective values, and anarchism, in its loathing of centralized government and bureaucracies. Hence its members are frequently interested in primitive societies, especially the Amerindian culture which they regard as both a victim of and a saving alternative to the infernal structures of modernity. A facet of the Canadian counter-culture, as we can see in "LOVE OF LIFE," is an espousal of nationalism as a way of resisting "American" values, especially individualism, in the interest of evolving communal societies. The pervasive problems of "identity" in modern life are met by a renunciation of ego, an abandonment of the contingencies of our individual identities in favor of a sense of tribal relationship. For the present, survivors of the counter-culture generally share a sense of underground solidarity as victims of persecution by the "straight" world of corporate interests, power politics, parental authority and police harrassment. They shun careers in the service of the technological state, preferring the kind of lifestyle bissett aptly calls "gypsy."

One token of solidarity among the widely dispersed counter-culture nomads and their fellow travellers has been a lingo of stock phrases upon which bissett draws heavily in his work. It is a measure of bissett's talent that he can use this sublanguage so effectively, as Stephen Scobie pointed out in his review of Pomes for Yoshi: "nothing but this consistency of tone could account for the way in which Bissett is able to use such terrible cliches of counter-culture jargon as 'Far out', 'I can dig it', 'Heavy', and 'Got to get my shit together' with such complete honesty that the reader accepts them as being meaningful …". The same courage with which bissett resorts to popular slang is evident in those numerous poems which risk a plunge into the maudlin. Simple feelings of love, delight, tenderness and wonder are the motives of many poems so direct and childlike that they are apt to baffle the hardearned worldliness of literary critics:

In th mushroom village
all th littul children

brightly smiling
in th mushroom village
all th littul children
brightly be

(from "Circles in th Sun," in Lost Angel Mining Company)

One of bissett's great gifts is his ability to make compelling poetry of feelings which may embarrass our tortuous sophistications or superficial notions of masculinity. As he says elsewhere, much to the point:

Paramount among counter-culture attitudes is a revulsion from technological mentalities oblivious to simple human values. In Th High Green Hill bissett deplores our practice of "trying so hard to build we cant / help but destroy." A distrust of systems, analysis and judgement may express a crucial insight into our contemporary malaise, but it may also provide an excuse for intellectual mediocrity, puerile behavior, or bad poems. Sophisticated spokesmen of the counter-culture frequently attack the idea of progress as one of the principal motives in the development of our civilization. Against the technician's view of time as linear, with a past to be studied and a future to be engineered, the counter-culture values moments of ecstasy achieved through drugs, music, sex and mysticism. And against the modernist view of nature as raw material to be exploited, the counter-culture perceives intrinsic value in natural things. This attitude is reflected in a preference for spontaneous over calculated behavior, a respect for ecological values, a recoil from urban living, a regard for the wilderness as a source of spiritual nourishment and a reverence for the human body. Bissett's poetry teems with references to biological functions and rhythms: vision, breath, heartbeat, blood circulation, excretion, copulation. Many of his poems present grim interludes of city-dwelling and images of desolation row. In others, seeking a liberation from the oppressions of history, he celebrates a paradisal relation of man with the natural world. His commitment to these values is not, however, without certain paradoxes: the general denunciation of order, but the systematic precision of some of his designs; the devaluation of ego, but the production of an enormous oeuvre under his name. And in his recourse to stereo recording to disseminate his sound poetry, there is perhaps a trivial clue to an important principle: that technology rightly employed may after all be the best way for the general population toward that condition of freedom and pleasure sought by the counter-culture.

But the implications of bissett's poetics and politics are apt to divert our attention from the first things we notice about his books: the quirks of format and content, the visual whimsey, the ingenuous lyrical beauty, and the rhapsodic power. This last quality I consider the sign of his most important work, the visionary poetry in his longest volume, Th High Green Hill. Though it includes a few collages, wordgames and concrete experiments, this book is largely made up of brief visionary lyrics and long visionary meditations. I suggested earlier that bissett's sound poetry has a religious dimension. His performance on the LP which accompanies Medicine My Mouth's on Fire expresses the attitudes which inform traditional hymns, prayers and sermons. These attitudes are also implicit in Th High Green Hill, which offers a vision of spiritual redemption and fulfilment. Many passages delineate grimmer realities: the damage to nature and to people wrought by corporate exploitation and technological processing. The irony and rage which we observed in bissett's political poems provide the minor theme of the book. "America" appears again as the exemplar of all that is destructive in the exaltation of egotism as a personal and political philosophy. But the major theme is a transformation of vision and a recovery of those blessings of joy, beauty and mystery, of which modern culture deprives us:

The idea that the transformed vision involves a change in our relation to the natural world, indicates bissett's affinities with the great Romantic visionaries. Though the concern with vision exists throughout Th High Green Hill, the most explicit development of the theme occurs in a similar though much shorter volume, Polar Bear Hunt (1972). Here bissett insists that we need only cultivate "th eye uv th soul" to end the spiritual exile suffered through our habitual way of seeing the world. (We may recall Blake's distinction between imaginative and corporeal sight.) We suffer from our conviction that we see most clearly when we divorce ourselves "objectively" from the world around us. Objectivity is for bissett a life-denying stance, the hallmark of egotism and the rationale for destruction; he urges our participation as whole creatures in the glories of our world, whether through dreams, imagination, love or celebration. As expressed in one of the chants in Th High Green Hill: "yr heart is th eye uv th universe." He urges an opening up of our responses to the world we inhabit. Abandoning the ego, we become fit for revelation and enter into ecstasies.

Many of the poems in Th High Green Hill evoke these ecstasies. Their language and structures reflect the awareness of plenitude, beauty, and mystery which is their main theme. If the style often becomes opaque, it seems less a reflection of vagueness in the experience than of the inadequacy of language to describe it. "Th breath" is perhaps the most splendid of bissett's visionary poems. The poet's sense of union with the world around him is conveyed through sharply realistic images of wood-chopping, cooking, and a vivid evocation of a winter camp in a forest by the sea. We understand that the palpable measure of things is our own body and its rhythms, not the abstract criteria by which we generally mark the passing of time or the extent of space—these are merely "veils / to pass thru," as bissett puts it elsewhere. Images of steaming breath, of smoke rising from a woodfire, and of mist rising from a river, affirm the spiritual identity of natural things. Perhaps the harmony of visionary experience and physical realities in bissett's poetry can best be illustrated by one of his brief lyrics, "snow cummin":

Notice the rich asociations between the images of this extraordinary poem—the iconic unity of man and tree suggested in the lines on getting in the firewood; and the way the erotic images bend our attention back to the title, "snow cummin," which then becomes a metaphor for the onrushing seed that seals the union of man and woman in the greater unity of earth, sky and forest. And what is "th original plan"? Merely the poet's morning routine? perhaps the breathtakingly beautiful communion with the land, which our race has somehow forsaken?

The "return to nature" is such a popular cliche and a persistent theme in our literature that there can be no question of its psychic pressure in our lives. Throughout Th High Green Hill bissett recharges the most common images of nature with mystery and radiance: birds, flowers, hills, ice, snow, grass, animals, stars, sun, moon, earth, air, fire, water—all recover their primal power as kindred presences in our lives. Two images especially seem to acquire a crucial symbolic meaning: waves, as a trope for breath, continuity, duration; and fire, as the spiritual incandescence in natural things. The long meditations—"WILD FLOWRS ABOVE TH TREE LINE," "th high green hill," "MEDICINE," "th mountain," "lettrs (for a passing comet," and "PRAYRS FOR TH ONE HABITATION"—variously develop bissett's visionary themes: desire for the eclipse of the established order and the rise of an ecstatic community, the quest for a faith to endure and discover primitive ways, the prophesying of ancestral voices. Some of them share a common pattern: beyond the doubts and anger they express, they close with a rising crescendo of affirmation, a sense of homecoming to the land, to the present, to the blessings of the green world.

"PRAYRS FOR TH ONE HABITATION" begins by considering the treacheries and possibilities in words. Like so much of bissett's work, it merges comic realism with lyrical vision. The poet leaps out of bed, urged by a sense of imminent revelation, and runs smack into the wall. The admission to the poem of this level of human experience makes us the more willing to take its higher vision seriously. And of course, "higher" is the wrong word to use. Bissett envisions not a transcendence of "th one habitation," but a revelation of its beauty and fullness through our departure from personal obsessions and a tremendous intensification of our powers of apprehension. The poem implies a reverence for the elemental forms of life. "Animal" is no more a pejorative term for bissett than for the North American Indians with whom he shares a sense of affinity with other creatures, a respect for the powers of nature, and a desire to participate in rather than master the natural world. The meditation turns toward the question of evil—the destitution wrought by our social and political systems on the creative core of our beings….

The poem ends with a mighty song celebrating the earth and all of its natural forms as home, reminiscent of apocalyptic passages in Romantic and modern poetry from The Prelude to "Sunday Morning."

Though the motif of pilgrimage in some of bissett's meditations, and his emphasis on achieving bliss through a kind of self-renunciation, suggest parallels with the great world religions, his work reflects more closely the values of primitive religion….

[In] performing his sound poetry, bissett often passes over completely from art to ritual. And the willingness with which he has suffered deprivation and persecution for the sake of living a life consistent with his vision, is not unlike the shaman's arduous discipline for the sake of cultivating his powers.

Many of bissett's drawings and paintings also reflect the primitive sympathies in his vision. Numerous designs in his volumes resemble the petroglyphs which continue to be discovered in the Canadian wilderness, remnants of the sacred arts of various Amerindian tribes. As though expressing the spiritual energy which (the Indians believed) pervades nature, bissett's favorite designs are peculiarly fluid, suggesting the shapes of flames, or sunbursts, or flowers, or wings, sometimes simultaneously. His drawings have a primordial quality: ample space, simple lines, a curious brilliance. Perhaps their most significant motif is the interpenetration of tapucuman havtomy with elemental images of the world's body: waves, sun, mountains, hills, trees. The human or semi-human figures often suggest primitive people and their priests, or gods….

A final point I'd like to make about bissett is beautifully illustrated in a concrete poem near the end of Th High Green Hill. This "rattle poem" is a delightful visual pun: there is no need for me to comment on the appropriateness of its shape and "sound." But I think it's important to ask, who uses rattles? And of course the answer is, two sorts of people: babies and shamans. "I wanta rattul" could be merely a peremptory demand for the toy, but it can also mean, for the baby, "I want to play," and for the shaman, "I want to perform a ritual." Nor are these last two meanings very distinct from one another. As Johan Huizinga has suggested, ritual and play are intrinsically related, and express impulses which may also issue in poetry—especially lyric poetry, which comes "closest to supreme wisdom but also to inanity." Such an insight can illuminate the main features of bill bissett's art: its affinity to the primitive; its frequently enigmatic quality; its heavy use of repetition; its subversive intent; its exuberance, its capriciousness, its moments of astounding beauty and power. It may also give us some understanding of one of the most marvellous of his achievements: the demeanour of perfect seriousness and perfect non-seriousness, simultaneously. Perhaps this is one of the rich dimensions missing from our lives—at least, since we grew up.