Milton Acorn and bill bissett, I Want to Tell You Love, A Critical Edition, eds. Eric Schmaltz and Christopher Doody

 

            This introduction will acquaint readers with I Want to Tell You Love along with the places, figures, and ideas that were central to the creation of the book. It begins by providing an overview of the tradition and milieu within which Acorn and bissett were writing in the 1960s. It then moves on to chronicle the convergence of events that let to their meeting in Vancouver. Next, it provides a detailed textual history of I Want to Tell You Love’s creation and its subsequent history of dismissal. Penultimately, it advances a short treatise that underscores the book’s significance and its contributions to the discourse of Canadian Literature and the history of avant-garde writing. It concludes with a few points regarding bissett’s and Acorn’s careers and friendship after their time in Vancouver. Despite their aesthetic differences, bissett and Acorn both hold a fundamental belief in poetry’s transformative capacities for stimulating social change. This edition fosters greater attention to I Want to Tell You Love as a significant meeting of discordant voices, but more importantly as a significant record of Canadian avant-garde activity that engages with, and documents, the frenzy and exhilaration of the 1960s in Canada. (Eric Schmaltz, “Critical Introduction”)

Admittedly, I wasn’t sure what to expect upon first hearing of I Want to Tell You Love, A Critical Edition, eds. Eric Schmaltz and Christopher Doody (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2021), the previously-unpublished early 1960s collaborative work done by two of Canada’s more important poets to emerge out of the social, political and cultural mimeo-propelled burst of 1960s literary production: Milton Acorn (1923-1986) and bill bissett (b. 1939). On the surface, the two writers couldn’t be any more different, whether through their personalities or how their work sits on the page, but both this project and Schmaltz’s incredible introduction provide a wealth of argument for how the two connect, as well as their overt interest in engaging exactly with those differences. Acorn had already produced a book or two by the time the two poets met up in Vancouver, but it is curious to consider, that had this book-length collaboration actually been accepted by the publishers of the day, it would have pre-dated bissett’s two 1966 solo collections. According to Schmaltz, the main argument for the array of rejection this collection managed was exactly the strength of this collaboration, as potential publishers misunderstood that this is not simply a work by two wildly different poets, but a conversation around where their work actually meet, allowing their work (including bissett’s drawings) to connect into and around each other.

Of the universe, one spirit
should be held up, to the many
stars we know shine within
ourselves.

            One love can be known
all loves pay homage to.

The rose, the sea, white or deep,
the colors are many and one
in resolve; the fire, demons, past
for an angel, all human
in spirit. You can speak beauty
of any flower.

                    Young girls, rose
again, and boys play summer evening
games outside. And they are inside, the
walls are that artificial, useful
to believe in. (bill bisssett, “Crossing Directions”)

As well, it has been a joy to see a small handful of critics over the past few years—I’m thinking not just of Schmaltz, but of British poet/critic Tim Atkins, who offered an incredible piece on bissett’s early influences at the 2018 Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age conference at the University of Ottawa [see my notes around such here], as well as a foreword to bissett’s 2019 selected with Talonbooks, breth : th treez uv lunaria: selektid rare n nu pomes n drawings, 1957–2019—have finally been starting to provide bill bissett some proper critical acknowledgment and assessment, all of which is wildly overdue, especially when one considers that bissett is still producing, touring and publishing.

I Want to Tell You Love, A Critical Edition is a remarkable edition, and in certain ways, for reasons far larger than the presentation of this particular collaboration, offering context on and around a specific and hugely engaged period of Canadian writing, politics and culture. Through his remarkably thorough sixty-page critical introduction, Schmaltz examines the political and social landscape that opened up different ideas of culture that led to this particular moment, from the post-war period and the emergence of hippy culture to the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts, circling in on Canadian literature and into British Columbia politics, all before landing on how these two vastly different poets from Canada’s East Coast ended up in Vancouver, and what they did once they landed. Schmaltz writes of the centres of Canadian literature during that period, and how both poets, however active, still existed well on the fringes (even in the context of perpetual-fringe Vancouver), well before the creation of such an oddball collection, which neither could get anyone interested in (apparently each pulled poems from the work to land in their own future solo collections). With the inclusion, as well, of an afterword by and a contemporary interview with bill bissett, this might just be a must-have edition, not only for the purposes of a broader comprehension of Acorn and bissett’s individual careers, but of the hefty examination of the emergence of a particular period of Canadian writing and culture.

Untitled by Milton Acorn

Lover that I hope you are … Do you need me?
For the vessel I am is like of a rare crystal
that must be full to will any giving. Only
such a choice at the same time is acceptance,
as it is a demand high and arrogant.

Christ! I talk about love like a manoeuver of
armored knights, with drums and banners!
Is it for you whose least whisper against my skin
can twang me like a guitar-string? for
myself? or for something stronger than the saw
that cuts diamonds, yet is only a thought of perfection?

And this is not guarantee, only a promise
made by one who can’t judge either his weakness
or his strength … but must throw them
like dice, one who never intended to play
for small stakes, but once having made the second greatest gamble
and lost, lives for the next total throw.

Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend much of Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age, the Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa for 2018, organized by Robert Stacey and Claire Farley. I’ve been to a number of the annual conferences at the University of Ottawa over the years, from the Long Poem Symposium back in 1996, to conferences on Modernism, Al Purdy, Postmodernism and Robert Kroetsch, but this was far and away the most vibrant and exciting conference I’ve attended (and I was able, in case you hadn’t seen, to produce some chapbooks specifically for the conference – Derek Beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Arnold McBay + Gregory Betts and Tim Atkins – as well as some very recent titles by other participants (who hadn’t actually mentioned “I’ll be in your city two weeks after you produce that”) – Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi and Sean Braune – so the whole conference, between them and a variety of others, felt awash with above/ground press authors (Porco! Barwin! Baker! Anstee! Schmaltz! Davey!).

There were some remarkable papers presented, from Tim Atkins’ paper exploring some of bill bissett’s early, pre-Vancouver influences, Cameron Anstee’s paper exploring some of his ongoing work on the late artist Barbara Caruso (specifically her presspresspress), Zane Koss on the poetry networks of Louis Dudek and Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s, Natalie Leduc’s paper on Rupi Kaur as poetry activist (she presented a great argument for such), Paul Barrett on Sandra Djwa’s digital work from 1970, and Michael Nardone exploring the differences and constructs of digital archives vs. repositories, specifically UBU Web, PennSound and the Electronic Poetry Center.

What was impressive, as well, was the fact that there were so many performances, all of which (unfortunately) I managed to miss, due to overload (and the requirements of children), including an evening of some twenty-one poets performing (all of whom were also presenting papers at the conference), and sound poetry by Gary Barwin and Stuart Ross, and jwcurry’s sound poetry ensemble Quatuor Gualuor. It would be difficult to highlight every paper that struck me, as that really would be the bulk of what I saw, but some of what I did find quite amazing included: Jessica Bebenek’s work translating T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into a knitting pattern, exploring the canon of the male genius through textiles; Amanda Earl and Eric Schmaltz’s artists talks, both of which focused on their own works, from Earl’s work-in-progress “The Vizpo Bible” to Schmaltz’s debut poetry collection, Depths of Surfaces (Invisible); and David Jhave Johnson’s “Aesthetic Animism: A Synthesis,” which moved at such a rate and depth of knowledge and information that it left all in the room reeling. While I did miss a handful of papers, including Johanna Drucker’s talk on Saturday afternoon, the Closing Plenaries on Sunday by Gregory Betts and Derek Beaulieu were spectacular, with Betts exploring the origins of Canadian concrete and visual poetry emerging almost entirely and organically from visual art and an interest in the multi-discipinary (and almost completely unaware of international movements concurrently happening worldwide), while Beaulieu went through a series of contemporary female practisioners currently exploring new realms of concrete and visual works, including Helen Hajnoczky and Erica Baum.

And of course, jwcurry brought some prints of concrete/visual poems to display around the space, including works by P. Cob, Daniel f. Bradley, Judith Copithorne and Michael e. Casteels, such as a piece printed directly onto a cinder block.

All in all, stellar. I’m just disappointed that they couldn’t get funding for this conference. How the hell does such a conference not get funding? A book needs to happen from this conference. There was too much going on that requires recording, reading and further discussion.

I’m abuzz after so much activity, myself.

derek beaulieu, seen of the crime

The traditional poetic impulse is a refutation of language's inherent failures. It is the attempt to make language perform the impossible, to lucidly reconnoiter the ineffable. Metaphorical language is an acknowledgement of language's inherent downfall. Language is too tied to thingness, to objects and gestures (as Robbe-Grillet argues in “A Future for the Novel”) to plumb the depths of the human soul. This is not to say that metaphorical language does not have moments of beauty and grace, but those moments are the result of a larger failure. As poets, we attempt to bend language to our lyrical will. What results is inevitably a failure, but poetry exists in the degree to which the poem fails. (“An Irresponsible Act of Imaginative Language”)

Over the past fifteen years, Calgary poet, editor, publisher and critic derek beaulieu has been one of Canada's strongest and most visible champion of conceptual writing, and his new collection of “statements, essays, missives, and informal discussions,” seen of the crime: essays on conceptual writing (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2011) argues for the genre itself, as much as for a number of its practicioners. In thirteen short essays, beaulieu critically explores the work of bill bissett, Rob Fitterman, Gary Barwin, Emma Kay, Gregory Betts, Kenneth Goldsmith, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Dan Farrell, Caroline Bergvall, Gilbert Sorrentino, Craig Dworkin and many others working forms of conceptual writing, and providing context for works that rarely seem to get any kind of acknowledgement, critical or otherwise. Long known for his own poetic conceptual works, his trade books include With Wax (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003), Frogments from the Fragpool: Haiku after Basho (with Gary Barwin) (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005), fractal economies (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2006), Flatland (York England: information as material, 2007), Local Colour (Helsinki Finland: ntamo, 2008) and How to Write (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2010), as well as being co-editor (with angela rawlings and Jason Christie) of the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005).

The gall to call oneself a writer (and especially a poet) – with all the inherent cultural baggage – causes even more pause during those times when one isn't writing, when life has other plans, when one is between projects, or during that most-frightening period of “writer's block.” What do we go with the moments when we aren't writing? Are you a writer if you're not writing at all?

Enrique Vila-Mata's novel Bartleby & Co. is an essay by a fictional, frustrated, novelist. Vila-Mata's piteous, hump-backed, balding narrator last published a novel about impossible love twenty-five years previous and since that time hasn't written a single word. He “became a Bartleby.”

Bartleby, of course, is the eponymous character from Herman Melville's novella Bartleby the Scrivener who, in the face of capitalist expectation and responsibility, states that he simply “would rather not” have any active role in his own life other than that of refusal. Vila-Mata's unnamed narrator, in the face of a 25-year drought, explores the “writers of the No,” those writers who have decided to never write again. The book takes the form of footnotes for an imaginary essay. The notes build a history of writers, both real and imagined, who have decided that they were better served by not publishing (as typified by J.D. Salinger who did not publish a word after 1963's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction). Can not writing at all be a literary act? Can we consider that an author is adding to her oeuvre by ceasing to write? “(Besides, It's Always Other People Who Die”)

Part of what makes this small book so engaging is its brevity, packing a great deal into a small space, ranging from talks on one of Shakespeare's lost plays to Borges' imaginary library to calling bill bissett on his last thirty-odd years of publishing, in part for the fact that his seminal 1971 manifesto (read in its entirety a couple of years ago in Ottawa through jwcurry's efforts) “what fuckan theory—the key book in bissett's 45-year ouevre—remains out of print.” In this thin but substantial collection, beaulieu pulls few punches, providing essential criticism on work so rarely understood, or understood so well, and providing context for a range of materials existing on the sly margins of literature, a margin beaulieu manages to argue as the background, or even backbone, of so much other work that has been published since, often to wider attention.

bissett's manifesto flirts with what we would now consider conceptual writing, and includes a Sol LeWitt-like list of compositional strategies:

so yu dont need th sentence

yu dont need correct spelling

yu dont need correct grammar

yu dont need th margin

yu dont need regulation use of capital nd lower case etc

yu dont need sense or skill

yu dont need this

what dew yu need

what fuckan theory argues that the last thing poetry needs is more poetry. The linguistic signals of effective communication are unneeded for bissett's poetics, for “all these [things] yu dont need are tools of war.” With what fuckan theory bissett argues that the best way of interrogating the political control of language is to intercede with a radical orthography which foregrounds the text's materiality of the text and the author's ideological independence.

Ottawa International Writers Festival, spring 09: poetry cabaret #2 (talonlaunch) + #3

The second event for four authors in the space of a week and two provinces, Tuesday night was the launch of New York poet Adeena Karasick’s sixth trade collection Amuse Bouche, Toronto poet bill bissett’s sublingual, and griddle talk: a yeer uv bill n carol dewing brunch (with Carol Malyon), Vancouver writer Gerry Thomas Morse’s short story collection Death in Vancouver and my own poetry collection, gifts, all published by Vancouver publisher Talonbooks. After appearing in Edmonton the week before with playwright Kevin Kerr, launching his Talonplay on photographer Eadweard Muybridge, Studies in Motion, as part of the Edmonton Poetry Festival [see the photos from such here], I think we’ve decided that the four of us play well together, and should perhaps perform as a trio or quartet a little more often, which is good, considering there are talks about the group of us in Calgary and Vancouver come the first or second week of June. We work well together, concerned more about sound and the language itself, according to bissett and Karasick during the question and answer period after, than many of our contemporaries. Did you know that Morse has a voice that can sing opera, and does in some parts of one of his short stories, read in both cities? Did you know that Karasick has a three minute parody of a song for Barack Obama, hers for Osama Bin Laden?

My favourite part of the evening was asking bill (I facilitated the on-stage interview/conversation after the readings) about the book he did with Malyon, quoting him inside where he says “i think th provinces hav 2 much powr / i like federalism / i know its problematic,” and where he took the conversation further. Too often, it seems, bissett isn’t taken as seriously as he should be, his performances often allowing audiences to overlook just how aware and smart he is, and making it more jarring when he does slip in something brilliant and insightful in conversations, much the way he did in our combined radio interview at the University of Alberta the week before. I’m fascinated by Karasick, who seems to be writing out a study of language and culture using the language of language poetry, writing out writing in a way that no one else is, and I wonder if this is why she doesn’t get the critical attention she otherwise would, had she been working in a more conservative form. Theory-driven and theory-spent, Karasick moves through where most of us could not even begin, merging heavy thinking with a serious, sing-song play.

You Are Advised

I am sorry but you have failed this relationship.
Your performance was unsatisfactory.
And I am hereby administratively withdrawing you.
This relationship may not be repeated.
There will be no credit granted.
No makeup exam will be permitted.

Though you attempted to present a main idea or thesis,
your development was lacking, repetitious,
and at many times contradictory.
You demonstrated flawed or incomplete understanding
of fundamental mechanics and failed to meet
even the minimal requirements of the assignment.

The organization of your arguments were weak,
riddled with inaccurate summaries, faulty paraphrase
and reckless misquotation.

Further, if I may say, your vocabulary is limited.
Your syntax is rudimentary and often tangled.
Your explanations were poorly handled
(in a technical sense),
with recurrent lapses in judgment, digression and blurring.
You continuously overstepped boundaries
and there was little subject agreement.

Though you did exhibit variety and strong inflection,
(I dare say, an effective use of subordination),
I am making an appropriate transition now.

I regret any inconvenience
this may cause you. (Adeena Karasick)

[Zoe Whittall, eating] Wednesday night saw the second of three poetry cabarets, featuring Toronto writer Zoe Whittall, Montreal poet Carolyn Marie Souaid and Ottawa poet David O’Meara. Launching both her second poetry collection with Exile and first novel with Cormorant Books, why does Whittall keep publishing books with publishers who refuse to send out review copies? At least her second will be out this fall with Anansi. It was interesting listening to her lines, working straighter narratives on more personal matters, poems about home and growing up. It was interesting how the festival, a night after the Talon event, worked a poetry cabaret with three poets who worked, comparatively, relatively straight lines. Souaid, who hasn’t read in Ottawa in some time, suggested that her book had actually been pushed to an earlier release date, thanks to her participating in the 12 or 20 questions series last year (watch for a second series of same to start June first). You mean people actually read those things? She was launching the collection Paper Oranges (Signature Editions, 2008), edited by Winnipeg poet and editor George Amabile. She talked about living beside a graveyard and unable to drink the tap water for three months, worried that the bodies might have infused the water supply, before being convinced otherwise.

The Graveyard Lives Inside You

You taste bone in each sip of water. News-
print, bits of the previous century, straw, musk.

Those who did or didn’t make a sound when they died,
who whimpered, who trumpeted, who hit the road jack,
who refused to go gently, day or night; those

whose eyes shot forth, whose pores cried
blood, phlegm, urea, whose guillotined heads
flew, whose sponge fed the mad cow, whose
heart kissed a bullet, whose lips turned black.

You know it as Infinite dusk. (Carolyn Marie Souaid)

Ottawa poet David O’Meara might have had his book appear last August, but considering he was travelling Europe for six months starting August 20, this was the first Ottawa launch of his third poetry collection Noble Gas, Penny Black (Brick, 2008) [see my review of such here]. How does one feel connected to a new poetry collection after such an absence? I’ve been hearing O’Meara read around Ottawa for years, back to a reading he did at the Manx Pub with his pal Ken Babstock circa 1994, and I think this might have been the best reading I’ve heard him give, hosted by poet Rob Winger, who talked about O’Meara’s writing as having “a firm grounding in the contemporary.” His reading had a kind of clarity and precision that the other two writers didn’t quite have; wise, to make him third. And the best poem had to be his opener, a new piece exploring voice like a speech, from the “poet laureate of the moon.” After the reading, O’Meara talked about how the editorial process involved him removing much of the rhyme-schemes of a number of the poems, simplifying them; is there a correlation here? And in the question and answer session, where he referred to poetry as “an outlet to explore the reaction to things.” After his six months away, I am intrigued to see what kind of writing he has returned with, just what kinds of pieces might slowly emerge.

Powerboat

It was Sunday. September. Our crew
was pushing it hard for second place.
Our ears roared as the stem-post filleted

the Venice lagoon.
Then another boat kicked into the turn
and we hit their high wash. Our sponson

just pecked the wake, but hooked,
dragged, snapped and we barrel-rolled
back over front, then tacked—

a split-second aloft—
straight down, like hitting brick
at 80 mph. My mind left;

there was a high-pitched whine
like a dog’s whistle, that piped on and on.
I flat-lined. Giuseppe, the medic,

got to me, wiped the blood clear,
and blew into the place where my teeth used to be.
I’d been injured before, bruised black

as an old banana, and twice broke my nose.
This was different. There’s no fear,
you just know you’re gone.

Someone was screaming, She’s dead, leave her,
and there were thumps on my chest
like a fist on a tomb.

The sky fluttered, wobbled. I started to breathe.
I was nowhere; calm, happy. My team
hovered above while I flowed underneath.

And that weird whistle, the dazzling brightness.
I drifted like TV static, prickly-warm, like Epsom salts
dissolving and sifting through Giuseppe’s hand.

There’s one moment I remember
in all that light and clatter: I’d been lifted
into a helicopter when something cold

went from my neck to my stomach.
It was paramedics bent over
my shattered body (for all I knew kneeling to pray),

and cutting through my race overalls with a cold
pair of scissors. I remember thinking,
But it’s a La Perla bra. It’s expensive,

they’re going to cut it off. Then they lost me again.

WHAT FUCKAN THEORY: bill bissett in Ottawa

On Friday, January 20th, 2006, Ottawa residents in the know were treated to the second installment of jwcurry's Hit 'N' Run Lecture Series (see my note on the first one), as Toronto poet bill bissett read the entirety of his book of theory, Rush what fukan theory a study uv language (grOnk / blewointmentpress, 1971). Consisting of nearly an hour of continuous reading (and perhaps more; the time flew by, and I don’t think a single person checked a watch), it was an important reading of what many of us realized was an important document in Canadian literature. In many ways, bissett has perhaps produced more work and been treated to less serious critical consideration than almost anyone over the past few decades in Canadian writing. Imagine: every eighteen months, bissett has had a book (each one thoroughly line-edited by editor/publisher Karl Seigler) with Vancouver's Talonbooks since at least the early 1970s, if not the late 1960s (most recently northern wild roses / deth interrupts th dansing, published in 2005), with dozens of other publications going back another ten years or so. Still, even with such a large body of published work, text and visual, so much of bissett's work is performative, and needs to be seen/heard to really open up an understanding of what he is doing with it, and has been doing with it for decades.

With an audience of twenty or thirty (curry would have a better sense of numbers, since he made us all sign something afterwards), spectators/participants included Max Middle, Jennifer Mulligan (bissett kept calling her "Chloe" -- apparently he mistook her for a gallery curator?), Anita Dolman, Michelle April, Grant Wilkins, Jennifer Books, Riley Tench, John W. MacDonald (some of the photos he took of the reading, including pics of bissett, curry, Tench, myself and Mulligan are here) and even some of our lovely National Librarians (interesting to see anyone from the library/archives come to such a strange and radical (for this city) event).

During the reading, bissett told the story of when, the day after bpNichol won (co-won, actually) the Governor General's Award for Poetry, he called Nichol to borrow money. The result was Nichol giving bill $100, with the stipulation that he produce a book of theory, thus making Rush what fukan theory a study uv language not only a document written relatively quickly (bill was pretty sure, as far as his memory goes, that he wasn’t getting the money until after the completion of the manuscript), but one that was a co-publication between bill's publishing house, blewointmentpress, and bpNichol's grOnk. (In jwcurry's note for the event, he gets further into detail by explaining that Rush what fukan theory a study uv language was issued as the last publication of bpNichol's grOnk series, Volume 8 #8, and published by blewointmentpress.)

Held in the former Dragon's Tail location at 880 Somerset Street West (directly underneath the current location of jwcurry's Room 302 Books), in the space of a driving school, the only real strange part of the reading was Riley Tench's intermittent demands that bissett read/perform the poem "a warm place to shit," despite the fact that the whole event was set up for bill to read/perform a specific text (Tench wasn't terribly interested in waiting for his request to be performed afterwards). Usually quieter, and quite wry in his humour, Tench was part of a loose contingent of late 1970s and early 1980s Peterborough, Ontario poets and artists that eventually relocated to Ottawa, including Michael Dennis and Dennis Tourbin; other parts of the disparate group, such as Maggie Helwig, moved in the other direction, to Toronto. Unfortunately, Tench, an active poet and publisher, hasn’t produced any material in perhaps twenty years, but has started coming back out to readings since the founding of the ottawa international writers festival. Also, throughout the reading, I realized I wasn't learning a single thing about driving. What I did learn, was a theory that still held about the fear of most writers and writing of anything not straight linear, and how collage works of text over text over text usually get the short end of the stick, let alone critical considerations (I really need to sit down with this document….).

Originally produced in an edition of 500 copies in 1971, I'm now wondering if it would be worth putting bissett's document of theory ("what theory / its a fact") back in print? And who the hell would be interested in doing such a thing? A scattered collage of theory, speculation, drawings, commentary and visual/concrete pieces, much of which feels still ahead of most contemporary poetic thinking, Rush what fukan theory a study uv language is a document that certainly requires (on my part) further study. I'm hoping some university library has a copy for me to bootleg, somewhere (curry says he has a copy or two available for $75 each). Part of the evening made me wonder what curry will come up with next; if further installments might involve/include Steve McCaffery or Daniel f. Bradley, perhaps?

Related (recent) posts: bill bissett: inkorrect thots & the bill bissett-related blog that ross priddle introduced me to.