Luv Lttr

Last fall, I found myself happily stuck on “the offishul web site 4 bill bissett.” At the centre of its burgundy landing page is a seventeen-year-old photo of the octogenarian Toronto poet — blurry, askew, and mid-speech. Hovering around the image are more than a few options for further exploration. Other than the lime-green “hi — my name is bill” in the top right corner, almost everything is clickable. You can “email bill here” or press directly on his email address. His portrait divides a seemingly impossible choice between “nu CD” or “nu book,” though both will bring you to the same page where nothing is exactly new. Bissett, who was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2024, makes no assumptions about intrepid users scanning the various fonts cast in pinks and oranges and yellows for some kind of direction. “i am a poet nd an artist,” he explains, with two more hyperlinks that will take you to samplings of some of his poems and drawings. One of them is where I go to assure recoiling friends that his phonetic style is more than aesthetic play:

If the writing and sketches aren’t quite enough context, you can click “herez mi cv,” “herez my videos,” or “herez my photos.” Floating off to the side, “My Passion in Life” will transport you to the Secret Handshake Clubhouse. Co-founded by Bissett, the organization is “Canada’s first and only peer-support facility for people with schizophrenia.”

If all else fails, his phone number and mailing address are right there. Bottom left.

I’ve visited this corner of the internet dozens of times over the past year. Although the contents aren’t rigorously updated, it has remained, at least to my eyes, alive with freshness. There’s always something to find, some Bissett-shaped rabbit hole to go down or some morsel of obscure countercultural history to unearth (the designer of “this humble site” is Paddy Aldridge, whose tiny appointment-only Toronto shop has served as a resource for Canadian drag and cross-dressing for almost fifty years). Perhaps Bissett stopped adding pages in 2019, the year of his most recent resumé entry (though he has since published a few volumes). Perhaps that was simply when he moved the original 2007 website to a different server. Whatever the case, I’m glad it sits there, shimmering and unchanged. The only way to be, it suggests, is funny, elliptical, unassuming, idiosyncratic, and true to your own slant. (And friendly: “hi — my name is bill.”) Like his poetry, it’s not perfect. In fact, on its surface, it’s shoddy, circuitous, and only partly functional. But it’s a Bissett masterpiece all the same. And, these days, it’s easier to find than some of his other wonders.

I discovered Bissett through his latest collection, th book uv lost passwords 1. The odd PDF stuck out among a slew of forthcoming poetry books vying for review in these pages. I was charmed by the title and the glowing red and blue cover. It begins, “ths is th book i alwayze wantid 2 write.” The poems that follow are nothing short of disarming. Any veneration for language is tossed out. Reverence is a limited resource, and Bissett conserves it for the inexplicable: love, friendship, existential wondering, and natural beauty (as well as boo boo, his late cat, whom he describes as “a magik prson”). Entries like “seriouslee without th sun wher wud we b” make this choice plain. If there is anything worth being attuned to, it is “th xquisit uneventfulness uv evreething” and the “rivrs uv evreething” that “run thru our streets / crushd hearts brokn lungs n limbs.” Rules of spelling and punctuation can’t apply when trying to answer “why cant evreething b diffrentlee bettr.”

Some pages of th book uv lost passwords 1 hold little more than one line —“will we know whn we know”— and a sketch or a spread of typographic play. These are not the austere, restrained lyrics I’d grown to expect from recent poetry but deeply affecting concrete and sound poems that recall poets as varied as bpNichol (a collaborator of Bissett’s), Stevie Smith, Gertrude Stein, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. These are “breths breething being mooving thru th / touching cumming spilling out th inward / n outward bodee mooving in2 th scene.” The volume stole an afternoon, then a weekend. I wandered over to my local bookstore for more but came up empty-handed. I reached out to a friend — a publisher and bookstore owner in Windsor — who wasn’t sure if there was anything among his many boxes of rare titles in storage. I met with another used-book seller in Montreal who, chuckling, sold me a few special editions from blewointment press (which Bissett founded in 1963; it would later become Nightwood Editions), amused that someone under sixty had taken an interest in such footnotes of Canadian publishing. In Brooklyn, I found two of his first editions with Talonbooks, his current publisher, that I couldn’t help but gift to my brother and my partner (though I’ve since indefinitely borrowed them back). Another friend went to a small retrospective of Bissett’s paintings in Vancouver, where some old zines were also for sale. When he called to ask if I wanted anything, he rattled off names of bygone micropresses I’d never heard of and titles I hadn’t seen cited or mentioned anywhere. But it wasn’t until recently, at McGill University’s rare books library, that I was able to get a fuller view of just how vast the ocean of Bissett ephemera is.

In 2019, Bissett published more than 500 pages of “selektid rare n nu pomes n drawings.” Borrowing from dozens of other books and chapbooks, breth: / th treez uv lunaria invites readers into a sometimes impossibly large and unkempt body of work. This “hugely welcome collection,” Tim Atkins writes in the foreword, “allows the wider public access to a range of small press and fugitive writing that has been almost impossible to obtain.” Indeed, wrangling the highlights from the editions published under Bissett’s name — not to mention all the zines long out of print — would be no small task. Even if one were to get their hands on his entire backlist, Atkins suggests, it would challenge the senses and feel “either too familiar or too unwieldy.”

Unwieldiness still prevails in breth. The scores of poems and visuals mostly appear undated, but the passing decades make themselves known. In this wild gathering, readers can witness Bissett’s poetics developing in tandem with a world that he finds to be as violent as it is beautiful. In “chile,” he writes, “today they think they got allende.” They got “his body his blood his eyes,” yes, but the American government wrongly “think they killd th spirit / too.” Later, in “what wud reelee help,” he dreams: “if president bush n his entire // kabinet wer impeechd / 4 war crimes konviktid n / all givn life sentences / without chance uv parole / thats what wud reelee help.” Everywhere, his grave concern for “erth” is felt. “th presyus watr evreewher is dying,” he observes. “watr we still love yu cum home cant live with / out yu.”

Bissett sustains strong criticism of, as Atkins put it, “all oppressive forces that have crossed his path.” But it is the rare Bissett poem that does not maintain optimism, that does not wish, want, yearn, or hope. In “langwage n desire,” which may well be the definitive description of his poetics, he insists that “thers mor 2 life thn being / thers also bcumming.” Even one of his most despairing pieces on heartbreak, “torn sleeve,” from the 1971 collection NOBODY OWNS TH EARTH, ends with “ium a bit scorchd. / but that’s alright. what next.” Transformation comes up often, as does the transformative nature of sex. Lovers — who are addressed as the ever-poignant “yu”— usher in moments of change, revelation, depth, sweetness, and, at his very best, astounding humour. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d build the next selected work around “i dreemed i livd with keanu reeves,” from his 2004 collection narrativ enigma. The poem starts out silly, then shifts:

We can all appreciate the beauty of an erotic dream about Keanu Reeves, but Bissett alone can make it an occasion to reveal the quiet decisions we must make to sustain and grow love.

In pomes for yoshi, from 1972, Bissett writes through a stretch of “numbrless” days and nights. Fear and petulance grace this early meditation on loss, but there is also a glimpse of his prolific nature: the “limitless / desert” in which, he admits, it can be “hard / to live.”

Bissett is now one of those rare authors whose surnames immediately come to mind when I walk into a bookstore. I hold my breath, squint, and dread the gap between Bishop and Blake. There are worse consolation prizes than a swift read of “At the Fishhouses,” but I do wish there were a few more Bissetts in circulation: more “mewsik uv naytur” and “nothing is whol” lingering among the knowledge that is flowing and flown.