its th sailors life / still in treetment

A pioneer of sound, visual, and performance poetry, bill bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently since the 1960s worked to extend the boundaries of language and visual image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry. bissett’s latest collection since the monumental breth (Talonbooks, 2019), its th sailors life / still in treatment is, using the poet’s own words, “an epik poetik novel uv langwage n speech” confronting “thos controlling effekts on us” and about “acceptans uv loss greef separaysyuns charaktrs in serch uv self liberaysyun n societal equalitee n all th forces against that path.” 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’s expressive assemblages in this collection are “like walking thru sum fne lines.” The poems in this collection are coupled with stunning illustrations by the author.

AUTHOR

bill bissett

bill bissett opened Canadian poetry to postmodernism and from there proceeded in every direction all at once. Since his invention of the blewointment press in 1963, bissett has worked diligently to explode all boundaries of author, text, and context, radically disrupting static and disciplinary modes of art making. Read, taught, studied, and imitated all around the world, he now lives in Toronto, painting and writing somewhere between painting and poetry.

derek beaulieu is the author 9 books of poetry and conceptual fiction, editor of the acclaimed small presses housepress and No Press and co-editor of Writing Surfaces: the Selected Fiction of John Riddell (2013). He is an instructor at Mount Royal University and the Alberta College of Art + Design. beaulieu’s Seen of the Crime: Essays on Conceptual Writing was published in 2011.

Gregory Betts is the Director of Canadian Studies and the Graduate Program Director of Canadian and American Studies at Brock University. He is the author of five books of poetry, and the editor of four books of experimental Canadian writing. His monograph Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press.