bill bissett
Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby St.
"hudduld in foetal sleep undr th soft eternal
rain inside the dream a mushroom space ship
floats us worreeless up into th centr uv th
reveree"
From vancouvr
Active as a painter almost as much as a poet, bill bissett supported himself since the 1960s by selling his paintings and reading poetry. The Vancouver Art Gallery hosted an extensive one-person show of bissett’s art in 1984, called fires in th tempul. Thirty years later a second major B.C. author, Douglas Coupland, also had a one-person VAG show at this location. Labelled a “man-child mystic,’’ bill bissett proved William Blake’s adage that “the spirit of sweet delight can never be defiled.” After he produced more than 70 books of poetry, his writing was easily identifiable due to the incorporation of his artwork and his consistently phonetic (funetik) spelling. Idealistic and ecstatic perspectives frequently obscure his critical-mindedness, humour, and craftmanship. bissett’s poetry was the subject of a six-month brouhaha in Parliament in 1977-78 over the fact that taxpayers were subsidizing allegedly profane poetry. His main publishing house Talonbooks and professor Warren Tallman, who taught bissett at UBC in the early 1960s, organized literary benefits that included Allen Ginsberg and Margaret Atwood. After 45 years as a writer and publisher, bissett received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.
