scars on th seehors

scars on th seehors is bill bissett’s latest report from and to the image nation, in which his metric performs a kind of absence of narrative intent that lets everyone and everything speak for itself:

eye dont have 2 invent th world ium / alredee in it

There is much evidence of wounding here, of things gone completely raging:

whats th mattr / why yuv hardlee touched yr dinnr / at all / n its yr favorit saus / is it th tektonic plates

but also a hope of healing, of patching up, of scarring:

i see th salmon talks will / resume on monday / well thank god at leest th / salmon ar talking

along with, of course, the usual ““difficult choices””:

it usd 2 be / (4 konrad white n ken / thomsod) / yu cud get sum toilet papr / nd a newspapr both 4 / a dollr fiftee / now yu cant yu gotta / make a chois

Definitely not Conrad Black’s National Post. Ain’t it great?

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.