bill bissett performing his poetry at Parrsboro’s Main & Station
Writer and artist bill bissett brought poetry, politics and performance to the Main & Station arts centre in Parrsboro Sunday along with some advice for citizens’ groups fighting against proposed industrial gas/diesel plants in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
“Demonstrate against bad projects until bad projects stop,” bissett urged during an interview with Warktimes.
“As humans, we know how to do that and we’re good at that,” he added.
“And I hope we just keep doing that.”
Bissett made his comments after learning that the gas plants in both provinces would be built on ecologically sensitive lands with the one in Tantramar on the Chignecto Isthmus covering 36 acres, the size of 18 Canadian football fields, while the two in Pictou County near Marshdale and Salt Springs would each cover nearly 28 acres, the equivalent of 14 Canadian football fields.
“Our latest technology has some benefits, but it also has a huge amount of downsides because it needs more and more power to power it,” bissett says referring, among other things, to big data centres, proliferating electronic devices and electrical appliances.
For him, electric technologies raise political questions about who gains and who loses.
Poetry, politics & pornography
The 86-year bissett, author of more than 70 books of poetry, says he first got interested in politics when his father ran unsuccessfully in Halifax for the Progressive Conservatives in the federal elections of 1949 and 1953.
“The Conservative Party seemed a more adventurous, progressive party at that time and it continued that way for a while with people like Flora MacDonald,” he says.
“It’s only around the time of the reef arm party, if I can phrase it that way, that they became amalgamated with the extreme right and became ridiculously conservative,” he adds, referring to the Reform Party’s rebirth as the Canadian Alliance and its merger with the Progressive Conservatives in 2003 to form the Conservative Party of Canada led by Stephen Harper.
“My father also was a lawyer for Viola Desmond,” bissett says, adding that despite his father’s efforts, the Nova Scotia courts consistently refused to recognize the racism Desmond was fighting in 1946 when she was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow.
bill bissett’s latest book
Asked what his father taught him about politics, bissett replies: “That it’s a very rough game,” and he added that when the United States executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 as Soviet spies, his father said the U.S. had taken a horrible turn toward fascism — a turn that Donald Trump is now pursuing with a vengeance.
When bill bissett was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2024, the citation called him “a revered poet and musician” and “a pre-eminent figure of the 1960s counterculture movement,” but at the time, he says, he was constantly harassed and assaulted by police in Vancouver and later, London, Ontario.
“Police used to follow me in Vancouver and drag me out of alleys and haul me into their squad cars and beat the shit out of me,” he told the CBC’s Tom Power during an interview last December.
At the time, he was helping organize marches against the War in Vietnam, advocating for the legalization of marijuana and writing poetry that combined words with sounds using unconventional spellings and no punctuation.
In 1977, several members of Parliament attacked the Canada Council for the Arts for giving him grants calling his work disgusting and pornographic, and bissett received death threats, lost federal support, and had his high-school readings cancelled.
“There is nothing pornographic about my writing,” bissett says. “If there were, I wouldn’t need Canada Council grants to keep writing ever. Pornographers do really well if they are any good.”
Poetry, politics & performance
“This is a very good flashlight,” bissett says at his Parrsboro reading, as he prepares to perform “did yu c th moon last nite” from “th book uv lost passwords 1” his 340-page book of poetry published last year by talonbooks based in Vancouver.
“Let’s see, move my glasses in a certain position, hold the paper at a certain angle,” he says referring to his failing eyesight.
When he launches into the poem, he begins slowly, gradually picking up speed as he chants, then sings words and sounds to convey the joys of the moon’s luminescent beauty:
did you see the moon last night? Overriding everything and all the sailors and growing people only to eventually let go children, navigators, singers and swimmers in the streaming of between here and there and our dance of the sky divers and of women and men, women and women, men and men, bolero and the moon…
and then, gradually bissett is working toward the poem’s final political plea…
coming in and coming in and coming in the moonship and the moonship and the starship and the treasure ship and the ushallah ushallah…and we all need a guaranteed minimum income and that’s what we really need to sort out the world messes messes we need money we need time we need health we need work that we love to do we all need a guaranteed income for doing all that as soon as possible please, thank you so much.
Abou-shali ah-ha oushabaliba, ah-sha-baliba, abou-sha-baliba, abah-shaliba, oh-sha-la-ba-babababa, hoo-ah! Hoo-ah! Hoo-ah! Abou, abou, hoooooooooooooooooooewwwoo!
To listen to bill bissett’s performance of “did u c th moon last nite,” click on the media player.
bill bissett & sister Barb Fisher who lives in Glenholme, N.S.
To listen to bill bissett’s CBC interview with Tom Power, click here.
Amazing. Import a washed up “never was” poet from PEi to shore up terrible arguments. Same as a failed Green Party member to rage against the plant. The left never ceases to bore…..bring on the “acedemics” who have no depth in the matter.
Cruel, Mike. You don’t realize how much pain it causes academics, to be criticized by somebody who can’t spell “academic”. They could break a rib, laughing so hard.
Mike, whoever he is, couldn’t be more shallow. bisset has been a model and inspiration to piles of people, including poets. We’re lucky he washed up on our shores. Bored people are boring, and bisset is not that.
“Amazing” is right! To see that bill bissett was delivering his poetry in Parrsboro and that I didn’t know — and I MISSED it!
bill bissett is one of the world’s leading sound poets. To hear bill perform his work is to reacquaint yourself with the power of language! Notice, I didn’t say “English” language, but simply “language” — because what bill bissett does is to transform words into something new, beautiful and powerful, which carries poetry and its meaning into new realms.
I became a bill bissett lover waaaay back in the 1980s when I regularly attended and participated in the incredible “Sound Symposium” — a 10-day and night festival of new music, art, poetry, and dance held every other year in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The creator and director of that festival, the equally amazing Don Wherry, invited bill to come as a guest performer many times, and his evenings of poetry were among the highlights of the not-to-be-missed events.
The first time I heard bill I thought it was weird — and fascinating. The second time it was fascinating and I began to “get it”. And from then on, it was exciting, fascinating, mind-blowing, and life-changing! To read his written work, too, is a challenge and exciting. So…..lucky you, Bruce!
What I didn’t know was the trials and tribulations he went through during those years at the hands of the police. His poetry is no more pornographic than a bird’s nest in spring! What it is, is dangerous. It’s dangerous because it speaks truth to power in ways that RCMP officers in those days would have done well to listen to with open ears. And he is still doing that. bill’s history which he related to you, that you have shared here, is important for us to hear at this particular time.
The “arts” in the hands of artists are the most powerful “weapons for truth” available to us, and we need to take heed of what bill bissett is saying here, and to look closely at what he has done, and is still doing. There is nothing more powerful than a poem, a chant, a song, or a work of art — in the hands of an artist—to use as a platform for truth.
In the continued and escalating fight in NB and NS against the ruination of our land and waterways enabling companies and corporations like NB Power and PROENERGY to make billions off the ruination of our earth, I commend and encourage our fine artists, our musicians, our composers, poets, journalists, filmmakers, dancers and others who are using the subject-matter right under our noses to send powerful messages to humans who need to be woken up. Kudos to the “bill bissetts” among us, young and old, who dare to proclaim the truth through art!