New poems from Canada’s shaman of sound and performance poetry, bill bissett.

bissett’s innovations in sound poetry, have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. In this new collection of concrete poems, bissett writes “poemes uv greef transisyun n sumtimes joy byond binaree constraints if evreething goez what is aneething accepting nihilism lettr texting as an approach 2 heeling sorrow denial.

bill bissett
originalee from lunaria ovr 300 yeers ago in lunarian time
sent by shuttul thru halifax nova scotia originalee wantid 2
b dansr n figur skatr became a poet n paintr in my longings
after 12 operaysyuns reelee preventid me from following th
inishul direksyuns
?bill bissett
bill bissett garnered international attention in the 1960s as a pre-eminent figure of the counterculture movement in Canada and the United Kingdom. In 1964, he founded blewointment press, which published the works of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, among others.
bissett’s charged readings, which never fail to amaze his audiences, incorporate sound poetry, chanting and singing, the verve of which is only matched by his prolific writing career?more than seventy books of bissett’s poetry have been published.
A pioneer of sound, visual and performance poetry?eschewing the artificial hierarchies of meaning and the privileging of things (?proper” nouns) over actions imposed on language by capital letters; the metric limitations imposed on the possibilities of expression by punctuation; and the illusion of formal transparency imposed on the written word by standard (rather than phonetic) spelling?bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently worked to extend the boundaries of language and visual image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry.
Whether paying tribute to his hometown lunaria or exercising his native tongue dissent, bissett continues to dance upon upon the cutting edge of poetics and performance works.
bill bissett was recently a featured poet on the Heart of a Poet series, produced in conjunction with Bravo! TV.
Among bissett’s many awards are The George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award (2007); BC Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Prize (2003) peter among th towring boxes / text bites; BC Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Prize (1993) inkorrect thots.

bill bissett's profile page

“bill bissett, still relevant to younger audiences, balances multiple platforms, different genres, different ways of being, corporal, ephemeral, healthy, unhealthy, solvent and stuck, of sound and unsound mind. th book is a catalogue of prescriptions for getting through the pain, and this time more than before he doesn’t flinch at the details. … the art of reading bill is quite simple and very rewarding. He paints with words and music, orchestrating the apparent randomness of creation with an ironic intelligence that leaps just as high off the page as it does on stage. … We are lines that intersect and interact. In [bissett’s] perfect world, there are no degrees of separation as we move in and out, interact, love and accept one another.”
—Pacific Rim Review of Books

Reviews for ths is erth thees ar peopul
“His poetry addresses the limitless discussion of the boundaries between the personal and the political.”– National Post

Reviews for hungree throat
“An interesting and intriguing reading/viewing of the struggles of coming to terms with, and visualizing, a tumultuous world and ‘how we feel abt unsirtintee.’ ”
– Canadian Literature