The beats go on bill bissett on what the beat poets left behind by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
"There are people who haven't read [Ginsberg's] Howl," observes bill bissett. "They're going to read Howl soon, and then the conversations they have will change. Their sense of life and art and poetry will change." Bissett is a Canadian writer and performer whose endeavours show traces of the beat sensibility. His printed texts liberate the word from the constraints of punctuation and spelling, stripping it down to raw phonetic essence. This approach, with its accent on sound and rhythm, translates seamlessly into the brave new world of spoken-word and sound poetry. Canada's stodgy literary old guard has been frustratingly slow in accepting the performance-poetry posse as valid players. "In the jury rooms of the Canada Council, when they're discussing who should get what, sometimes they seriously discuss whether a person is a literary writer or a performance artist," explains bissett. "For a time they were dismissive of performance artists, thinking it wasn't really a literary art. To me, this breakdown seems arbitrary." It would be ridiculous to suggest that the beats gave the world the spoken-word movement. Culture was transmitted verbally long before some smart cookie came up with the concept of writing. The beats did, however, drag literature out of the library dust and into the view of a visually oriented society. They opened a Pandora's box of poetry-as-pop. Due in no small part to the MTV kickstart delivered by the likes of Henry Rollins and Lydia Lunch, the spoken-word scene has carried a high media profile the past few years. While many artists are wary of the mainstream brain drain, the sapping of intellectual substance that all too often accompanies repackaging for the hoi polloi, bissett sees this commodification as both artistically and financially beneficial. He finds the idea of poets having videos in regular rotation quite appealing. "Wouldn't it be great? It would increase the lines of communication between the artists and the audience," he says. "It's unbelievable that Lillian Allen and Clifton Joseph don't have videos on MuchMusic. The time has been right for that to happen for a long while now." Burroughs's last splash before his death was, of all things, a TV commercial for Nike. That's right, ol' Bill hawking running shoes. Perhaps it was just a compromise brought on by the urgency of his, uh... medical condition. On the other hand, it might have been his way of suggesting we reassess our stance on the rusty paradigm of mass culture and its reactionary alternatives. Bissett gives a nice, simple explanation. "You can deconstruct all the notions you've come to count on. Mainstream versus counterculture... it's a binary construct." bill bissett will be signing copies of his latest book, th influenza uv logik on Thursday, Sept. 4, 1pm at Chapters. The same evening, he'll perform at Café Campus with Gangster Politics, Dogs Playing Poker & The Pussycats. $5, 7:30pm sharp |
With the death of William S. Burroughs this summer, the literary world lost more than just a brilliant voice. The writer was the last remaining pillar of the beat generation's holy trinity of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Burroughs himself. These three postwar collegiate upstarts drew inspiration from Hemingway's lost generation and the debauched elegance of Byron, Shelley and Baudelaire, and fused academic abstracts with gritty streetsmarts and the mysteries of the esoteric. The poems and novels which resulted would go on to have an exponential impact on atomic-age counterculture and, inexorably, over-the-counter culture.