bill bissett (November 23, 1939 -)

For me, the beginning of bill bissett was a poet who wrote semi-phonetically, who appeared in pictures as someone who was once a beatnik, might have been a hippie, dabbled in glam and skipped punk to wear all four at once. Then, in the fall of 1983, I found an issue of 3 Cent Pulp atop a garbage bin at the Granville Island Public Market -- a beautifully printed poem by bill that told me it didn't necessarily want to be treated so beautifully, so completely, and I felt embarrassed by what I thought I "knew".

Years later, after seeing bill perform numerous times (sometimes sucking the life out of a room, other times injecting it with what he'd stored from the night before), I set out on a concentrated study of all things bill and, while an SFU Writer-in-Residence (2009-10), decided to use a line from the editorial of bill's first issue of blewointment magazine as the title of my exhibition at SFU Gallery, Burnaby: "to show, to give, to make it be there": Expanded Literary Practices in Vancouver: 1954 - 1969.

Following that, bill figured prominently in a curatorial segment Charo Neville and I worked on for Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties, an online project initiated by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and grunt gallery. A few years after that I included some of bill's written and editorial work in a small room at the Belkin devoted to 60s and 70s concrete poetry (part of the Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry exhibition) and bill kindly stopped by to give a tour. But it wasn't until Brock University's 2016 Two Days of Canada Conference (themed The Concept of Vancouver) that I had a chance to sit with bill and have a sustained conversation.

I forget what time it was, but it was after midnight and a group of us had just landed in Gregory Betts's kitchen where Greg was melting cheese onto bread for our snack. I noticed on the table a newspaper that included an article featuring the American actress Carol Channing and expressed shock that she was 95-years-old -- at which point bill started chanting, "The grand dames, the grand dames, the grand dames of Hollywood ... Carol Channing, the grand dames, Angela Lansbury, the grand dames ...." And this went on, with all of us shovelling names at bill of Hollywood actresses that we knew of in their 90s ("Eva Marie Saint, the grand dames ...  Betty White, the grand dames ...."). From that point on, if I wanted to ask bill a scholarly question about, say, the relationship between bpNichol and Earle Birney, or d.a. levy's Cleveland, or Judith Copithorne's convergence of concrete and expressive rhetorics, I would have to include the words "grand dames"  -- and endure those words in his reply!

bill bissett turns 80 today. happy birthday bill!