Writing on bill bissett in 1980 is a rather different venture than responding to his books as they appeared ten or even five years ago. Bissett's poetry was so closely identified with the political/cultural convulsion of the 1960's that even its admirers were bound to wonder how many of its features would retain interest as the years passed. This selection should reassure them. In the first place, it will remind us that his poetry had deeper sources than topical issues and literary fashion. In the second, it shows that his best work has always been charged with the energy and formal ingenuity of enduring art.

As a radical presence on the Canadian literary scene, bissett has been a controversial figure for some fifteen years. He emerged in the early 1960's in Vancouver as a pioneer in mixed-media, an innovator in concrete and sound poetry, a founder of blewointmentpress, and a frequent target of the local reaction against counterculture styles and values. He has been one of the most supportive of his own generation of Canadian writers and artists. He has also been subject to police harassment, and with fellow experimental poet, bp Nichol, has been denounced as a pornographer in the House of Commons. He has been attacked by reviewers in critical journals and praised by some of the most accomplished Canadian writers among both his elders and his peers.

Resistance to bissett's work has been so far largely conservative in tone. It is a resistance which most readers probably feel initially in the face of his startlingly unconventional writing and drawing. Objections to avant-garde poetry in the name of "the tradition," however, usually imply either an undeveloped or a fixated aesthetic sense. Whatever its critics may fear or its practitioners wish, the avant garde is unlikely to imperil the classics. What it can do is nourish and extend our aesthetic capacity through transforming our assumptions about art. Those who dismiss bissett's work out of hand and who, like Mr. Mustart, the unsympathetic bank manager in one of his poems, swing away

will miss one of the most exhilarating voices in our recent poetry. By now, the number and stature of bissett's admirers ought to guarantee his reputation against literary traditionalists, outraged parliamentarians, and other institutional agents. Conventional resistance may be replaced, however, by resentment among some of his more polemical contemporaries that his work crosses boundaries rather than closing them down, for an experimental poetics has never prevented his simultaneous and often skillful use of more traditional lyric and narrative forms.

An aversion to all doctrine, conservative or avant garde, fuels bissett's creativity, and a sense of wholeness is what distinguishes his work from much modern poetry. This wholeness is manifest in his central concern—the quest for "yunyun" (psychic, sexual, communal or cosmic), in his inclusive technique as poet and painter and in the personality which we come to recognize in his work. If at times his sympathies take him treacherously close to ideology or cliché, a leaven of irony, often self-directed, is apt to appear. In "the tomato conspiracy aint worth a whol pome," he parodies one of the obsessions of his own constituency; plotting by entrenched powers against the people. While he is quite clear about what he hates, he is too aware of his own complexity to make his hatred an icon or a dogma to close off the new insight or the next poem. In general, he has made his self-consciousness a condition of growth and strength rather than a fetish—or what amounts to the same thing, the spectre of an enervating malaise.

To read bissett carefully and at length is to be successively confounded, provoked, harrowed and delighted. It is also to become familiar with a variety of techniques explored by bissett, bp Nichol, and others, and introduced into Canadian writing in the 1960's. For bissett, the discovery of an art appropriate to his vision meant the questioning of every stylistic and formal assumption inherited from poets of the past, as well as prolonged experimentation with the visual and vocal aspects of language. His suspicion of convention led him to reject standard spelling and grammar. It also inspired a rebuke to the very notion of "meaning," if that is what we impose upon works of art to avoid the disturbing stimulus that a full experience of them may demand. Hence, certain pieces by bissett confront us with sheer disorder, defying interpretation and inviting us to reconsider our comfortable conceptions of reality.

The political significance of bissett's style can hardly be overestimated. From the beginning, he has maintained that "correct" spelling and prescribed grammar are instruments of class oppression and insidious restrictions upon imagination and its expression. His own peculiar composition and spelling (often phonetic) amounts to a personal declaration of independence from linguistic authority in general and traditional poetic practice in particular. He may well be the purest type in Canadian poetry of the visionary artist who, in William Blake's famous statement, must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. As a radical visionary, bissett resembles Blake, Shelley and certain other Romantic writers in his uncompromising advocacy of personal and intellectual freedom against power-seekers and claimants of privileged knowledge. "Knowledge" is in fact a negative term for bissett, signifying our division from the world and its creatures, or our abstraction from the artist's word or image. It is contrary to the primary values of participation, relationship and love. His work is intended neither to mystify nor to compel deference in its readers, but to enrich their imaginative life and evoke their own creative powers.

Among his most intriguing poems are those which stress the visual properties of words and letters, singly or in combination, beyond their strictly semantic value. His concrete poems tease us out of thought and challenge our imaginations. We are confronted, in one example, by a solid rectangle composed of alternating W's and M's. It is merely a typographical design to please the eye? A closer look discovers that it's not quite solid after all: a single "O" in the upper right corner breaks the pattern to suggest a number of words (if read vertically and diagonally as well as horizontally): "womb" "mom" "woe" "ow" "mow" "om" "wow". These terms form sets which can be related, with and without irony. Similarly, the "O" itself has diverse connotations: surprise and understanding, perfection and nothingness. Contrary nuances are also registered in the strong contrast between the angular shapes of the two consonants and the rounder contour of the vowel. The design indicates that even a slight swerve from uniform patterning can eventuate in the profundities of birth, suffering and consciousness. Light out of darkness. Or so I see it. While it may not be profound in itself, like many of bissett's concrete poems, this one has the deft suggestiveness of successful art.

Bissett's concrete pieces, like his more traditional poems, range from the playful and one-dimensional through the complex and satiric to visionary work informed with beauty and intensity. Akin to his concrete poems in their primarily visual technique are his paintings (abstract/representational), found art (cartoons, newspaper clippings, commercial graphics), photographs, and collages of any of the above. A number of these collages combine fragments of the alphabet with pictures of primitive or tribal figures, often in moments of violence or suspense. Each of these should be considered on its own, but cumulatively, they invite a meditation on the role of language in human experience. They seem to me to approach in a more detached perspective the primitivism of some of bissett's most distinctive creations, his line drawings of human or godlike beings, and his chants. The latter, of course, take us directly into the aural dimension of his poetry.

Like most of his generation of Canadian poets, bissett has been much concerned with the vocal aspect of his writing. His interest in "sound" goes far beyond the struggle for an authentic personal voice, however. While many of his poems invite reading in a conversational tone, others demand a more heavily stressed, even rhetorical intonation, and others still move into the realms of chant and incantations. One of the first steps necessary to appreciate bissett's poems is an awareness of his vocal patterns. It helps a good deal to have heard him live or on record; without that advantage it helps to read him aloud. A sense of his characteristic rhythms and attention to his spacing, line breaks and the larger shapes of poems clarifies much that at first perplexes in his disregard of normal syntax and punctuation. Amost all his traditional and much of his experimental poetry attests that "our desire moves / thru our lungs."

While bissett's sound poems have affinities with Oriental and Amerindian chanting, they are more than imitations. Remarkably, they combine with their reverence or praise the playful quality we often sense in uncodified ritual. While their power is limited in print, they are evidently designed to "release th spirit" from its accustomed prisons of belief and unbelief, boredom and distraction, anxiety and regret. In their "pure" form as sound without conceptual substance, they reach universal levels of feeling beneath the diverse vocabularies and idioms which distance us even within a common language. What force bissett's chants lose in print is partially compensated in their visual appeal as concrete poetry or as typographical abstracts.

Bissett's chants take to an extreme the repetition which is fundamental in his poetry. While he has developed various styles appropriate to his personal, political and visionary themes, certain features remain constant: elementary diction, a distinctive use of the copula, structural sequences of participles and conjunctions. To some extent he shares with other important poets of the 1960's and 1970's a sense of flux, an assumption that the poem only registers a condition or perception to be dissolved in the next moment or the next poem; however, his poetry as a whole also implies a powerful vision of enduring spiritual forces associated with sexuality and with the radiance of nature. At its best, his visionary poetry reflects certain timeless recognitions, largely through the recurrence which pervades its rhythms and imagery.

Like most visionaries, bissett is convinced that dreams are the source of poetry and that the greatest of dreams is the dream of paradise. This idea is most explicit in brief lyrics such as: "TH GOLDEN DAWN," "canoe," and "treez," but is also the essential impulse in much longer and more complex works marked by a fascinating constellation of images. Just as bissett's poems surge into extraordinary passages of sound, they generate motifs which seem extravagant compared to the scrupulously commonplace imagery of many of his contemporaries. The elements of wind, fire and water combine with more exotic images of jewels, dragons and chariots to suggest his affinities with traditional visionary art. One of his major poems here is "th breath," which opens a previous selection of his work, pass th food release th spirit book (1973), and which closes the present one:

Where bissett's writing differs from traditional visionary poetry and most resembles his contemporaries' work is in the fluid quality of his lines. If his evocations of paradise imply ultimate realities, his forms tend to avoid ordered delineation. He is much like other poets of his generation in his suspicion of the definitive or the conclusive. His work conveys the impression of an emerging vision, a revelation in process rather than the closure of achievement; hence, many of his poems approximate dreams in form as well as in content, "th missyun" and "rainbow music," for example, have the rich associative patterning and reverberatino of dreams, ["beyond even faithful legends"] is slightly different. While its fluidity may confuse us upon first reading, confusion is the problem it addresses. Readers who take time to give it a second or third reading will discover an exceptionally moving statement emerging from the text, a sense of emotional desolation surprised by a strength to endure and to seek a way out. The question is: how "to go on living" when conventional wisdom has failed. Do we "cease to care"? Align ourselves with political power? Find solace in the praxis love? The poem finally affirms the last course, while simultaneously challenging the popular notion of romantic love ("say who built this valentine"). Bissett urges us to look "beyond even faithful legends" for what will nourish our spirits and our relations with one another. For his own part as a writer, he must look beyond the legends of traditional art for a form faithful to his own vision.

Clearer in their delineations and more traditional in their use of language are a number of poems concerned not with harmonious states but with the contingencies of bissett's universe: personal and public circumstances which baffle or divert or menace. "Art is all use," bissett maintains, and we would be wrong to regard his concrete or visionary pieces as less political in implication than "NUCLEAR CIRCULAR" or "chile." The latter, however, deal more directly with the enormities of our destructive ingenuity in the late twentieth century and with the "power intrigue" which corrupts our institutions. The more successful political poems seem rooted in bissett's personal experience, setting very particular details—the preposterous and violent facts—in an ironic context. Generally, they affirm the curious dignity of most victims and the one-dimensional nature of their oppressors and exploiters. The "authorities" bissett encounters are always potentially human, though often dehumanized in their function. Bissett's own humanity appears in his range of tone, from the comic through the impassioned to the verge of despair. Until our collective visionary powers become more vigorous, a sense of irony may be our best aid to individual survival. Bissett's irony is seldom bleak, closer to humour and to the playful impulse which informs so much of his work. His blewointmentpress, wryly named after a treatment for body lice, since 1963, has tendered fantastic medicine for our rampaging social dis-ease.

The issues of integrity and exploitation are central to bissett's reflections on Canada, which increase the small number of good national medications in our poetry. To a degree, these create the same effect as his other political poems in identifying personal circumstances within larger problems. In "th north aint easy to grow food in" and "Th Canadian," bissett relates his life as a writer to a question of a national consciousness; in both circumstances, he urges the need for continuity between our material and spiritual resources, through the metaphor of "food." What will inspire our common health? In "canada," he probes our recalcitrant climate and history for qualities which might free myth from our reality and he articulates our contradictions and wholeness, our pettiness and strength. How can we realize the possibilities of this place in its largest sense? Bissett's best poems demonstrate the imagination's ability to break out of traps, even of its own making….

Living with the vision does mean distress as well as glory, in those intervals when the vision clouds or weakens or undergoes eclipse, and a survey of bissett's previous books (some forty of them) might well map out those intervals. But it would be of minor relevance in the end. His poetry springs not from a random or relative sense of his experience, but from an imagination which forms and reforms its intuitions of a vision potent in us all.