A Dash for the Border
In Bill Bissett, we continue to find a tremendous energy of form, directed almost against itself. Bissett reaches to the edges of language and destroys it, yet keeps returning. The visual forms on the page … always tend towards the destruction of any form they set up, while in sound Bissett returns to the strict and revivifying form of the chant. One tends to think of Bissett as a romantic artist, with a strong innate capacity for self-destruction, but he is also (at what I think is his best) capable of the strong control of his chants, or of the almost classical understatement…. Thus, for me the best things in Drifting Into War are the simple, controlled typestracts, produced by overtyping certain spaces within squares and rectangles of letters, which present clean, abstract visual designs. At other times, as in "A warm place to shit," Bissett proves that he is better than anybody else at parodying the worst of Bill Bissett. (p. 92)
Stephen Scobie, "A Dash for the Border," in Canadian Literature, No. 56, Spring, 1973, pp. 89-92.∗
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