Bill Bissett

bill bissett garnered international attention in the 1960s as a pre-eminent figure of the countercultural movement in Canada and the U.K. In 1964, he founded blewointment press, which published the works of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, among others.

A pioneer of sound, concrete, 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 image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry.

Among bissett’s many awards are: the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award (2007); BC Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Prize (2003) for peter among th towring boxes / text bites; and BC Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Prize (1993) for inkorrect thots.