its th sailors life / still in treetment

A pioneer of sound, visual, and performance poetry, bill bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently since the 1960s worked to extend the boundaries of language and...A pioneer of sound, visual, and performance poetry, bill bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently since the 1960s worked to extend the boundaries of language and visual image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry. bissett's latest collection since the monumentalbreth(Talonbooks, 2019),its th sailors life / still in treatmentis, using the poet's own words, "an epik poetik novel uv langwage n speech" confronting "thos controlling effekts on us" and about "acceptans uv loss greef separaysyuns charaktrs in serch uv self liberaysyun n societal equalitee n all th forces against that path." 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's expressive assemblages in this collection are "like walking thru sum fne lines." The poems in this collection are coupled with stunning illustrations by the author. (From Talonbooks)

• 22 books by past CBC Literary Prizes winners and finalists that came out in 2022
• Past CBC Literary Prize winners

bill bissett is a poet and artist born in Halifaxand based in Toronto. Known for his unconventional writing style, bissett has written more than 60 books of poetry. His awards include the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award and the BC Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

bissettwon secondprize in thepoetry category of the CBC Literary Awards in 1980.

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Sook-Yin Lee asks, Where have all the poets gone?

9 years ago

Duration 1:56

In Sook-Yin Lee's new documentary, the DNTO host goes on a quest to find the host of a show from the deep within the CBC archives, and to figure out what has happened to poetry over the past 50 years.