novel

Description

Famous and celebrated since the 1960s for pushing the boundaries of language and representation in the creation of image as a site of both content and context, the world's leading sound, visual, concrete and performance poet, bill bissett, describes this book as "a novel with connekting pomes n essays." Having already extended the boundaries of orthography, syntax, grammar, punctuation, and diction to free the linguistic creation of meaning from the conventions of the spoken and the written word often with arresting and astonishing results bissett sets out in his newest work to free and rehabilitate genre from its traditional role of limiting the possibilities of meaning in language, to greatly expanding them. He accomplishes this without a deconstructive erasure of, but with an apposition of genres that expands even further the possibilities of creating meaning through composition. As such, bissett's novel is in effect a response, by demonstrative example, to Jacques Derrida's famous argument in Of Grammatology: that any investigation of meaning cannot escape the opposition or dialectic of speech and language central to the Western philosophical tradition. Against this tradition, bissett posits Gertrude Stein's modernist observation that: "Everything is the same except composition " None of which is to say that bill bissett's novel is a five-finger exercise in the realm of pure theory. Quite on the contrary, his interweaving of fact and fiction what is considered the conventionally real with the imagined has created a narrative for the reader that is redolent with surprise and discovery. The counterpoint of the "fictional" story of jimmee's search for his lost love mark, to the lives of the "real" characters of the "pomes n essays" with which it interacts, takes readers of this novel to entirely new and engaging understandings of that part of the human condition that is delightfully accessible through language.

bill bissett garnered international attention in the 1960s as a pre-eminent figure of the counter-culture movement in Canada and the U.K. 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 over 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.