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Essay Type: interviews
Essay Date: 1978
T: I’ve come to collect your life story. So let’s start at the beginning.
BISSETT: I was born in Halifax. I started working when I was thirteen and fourteen in record stores. I used to do commercials for one store where I had two characters. I was like a hip young kid and I would push the rock n’ roll and then I had this other voice where I would push classical music and stuff. So it was really bizarre and stuff. And I worked in a gas station. Crap like that.
T: Was your family middle-class?
BISSETT: If there hadn't been so much sickness in the family it would have been like upper-middle-class. But there were hospital debts continually. My mother was sick for years. Then I was sick for three years when I was ten, eleven and twelve. Two years in the hospital, then another year to get better.
T: What did you have?
BISSETT: I had peritonitis. That's when you have an appendicitis operation and something goes wrong. The doctor leaves a hand in, or a glove. I dunno. The poison spreads through your blood and you can't crap. I couldn't go to the bathroom for two years. They put tubes in you so you get these scars.
Now it's so far out because I've been meditating for almost eight months. I worry less, have a more relaxed body system, smoke a little less tobacco, drink a little less coffee. I’m starting to get healthier without going on a head trip. It’s just sorta happening. So anyway, hair is starting to grow on my belly. It’s covering the scars and it’s so far out. Like in Halifax when I’d go swimming they used to yell at me all the time. They wouldn’t play with me sometimes because I had too many scars. [laughing] So I’m getting more confident on beaches!
T: Thanks to some hair on your belly.
BISSETT: Yeah. It took a long time for me to get better. They didn’t think I would live. After the twelfth operation it was okay. I missed two grades and just carried on. I couldn’t do sports for two years.
T: What did you take?
BISSETT: English and philosophy. I was supposed to be a lawyer cuz my father was one. He was a very idealistic lawyer who would take cases from people who couldn't afford to pay. A lot of that. He was never sick so he was always grumbling about doctor bills. That's where everything went. So no one wanted me to be an artist. I think my mother mightn't have minded but she had gone into spirit by then.
T: Were you the eldest son by any chance?
BISSETT: Two daughters and me. Then I wanted to leave Halifax. I used to run away all the time. When I was legal age, I split. I ran away to a circus once. The cops used to always get me back. So I came out west and starved here. Then I got a job with the library downtown and went to UBC. I did two years but I could never finish.
T: When would this be?
BISSETT: Around '64. I'm not sure. Anyway, I remember I was in this other course with a guy named Dr. Daniels. It was a Milton course because they thought I had promise as an English student person. But I didn't have that much promise because there was this seating plan and stuff and I would never sit in my right seat. I couldn't deal with this seating plan at all. There was a lot of other crap I couldn't deal with either. I wanted to write and paint.
[laughing] I remember I had to get this dumb language credit. I was writing this exam for German or something. I didn't like studying that stuff. I'd already bummed out of two other language courses. It was cool but it was weird. So I just put my pen down and walked out of the campus. It was my own little interior drama. I never came back.
T: Did you have many art friends in those days?
BISSETT: No. I hardly knew anybody. I worked at the library and I read. I started meeting other writers and stuff downtown eventually, but I never melted with the university scene.
T: Did you have any books out by then?
BISSETT: No, the first issue of blewointment started in '64, I think. I went directly into that when I left school. In '65, maybe there were three issues. It was a group thing. By '67 we were doing about five books a year. In the' 70' s it's been averaging seven books a year.
T: Where did the impetus to start blewointment press come from?
BISSETT: We started it in the '60's cuz no one else would print us. Visual writing was just too weird for other magazines. I guess that's the way most presses start. You get a bunch of people who are organically together and no one else will print them. It just grows and grows.
T: When you started blewointment, was it the starving artist routine? Eating potatoes and Kraft dinners?
BISSETT: Yeah. Living on welfare and stuff like that. In '66, a movie was made about me called In Search of Innocence. It took about six months with the director, Morris Embra. It was a beautiful movie.
T: Then you got busted?
BISSETT: Yeah, me and this folk singer from Seattle got busted. We were like the second bust in Vancouver. It was really a hot thing. A big deal and crap like that. The social workers were trying to take our child away. The police were coming all the time and I was getting beaten up. It was really getting bizarre. Crap was flying in every direction. The cops would come to bust the place and they'd tear my paintings apart. They would scream, "Why do you paint like this? This is insane!"
One day two social workers came to the door and they bought $800 worth of paintings and told us to get out of town. Or we couldn't keep our daughter. Before that they took our daughter away from us a couple of times. Because she didn't have pants on or something. We got hassled because we were artists.
T: Did you get dragged down by all that?
BISSETT: Well, we understood it all and fortunately we had a really great lawyer, Sid Simons. And Warren Tallman [UBC poetry professor] was a character witness. But like if our daughter walked down to the neighbourhood pool and took her pants off, which all the other kids did, the police would bring our daughter home. We'd get picked on. I suppose the movie we made didn't really help, even though it was a really peaceful movie about writing and painting. But there weren't any hippies yet. They didn't have a word to identify us. They didn't know what we were.
T: Post-beatnik, pre-hippie.
BISSETT: Yeah, they didn't know what destruction we might do. [laughing] All we were doing was painting and writing and living and smoking a little dope. Stuff like that.
T: Who's we? The mother?
BISSETT: Yeah, Martina. We've all gone different places but it's still together.
T: Where do they live now?
BISSETT: Different places.
T: Then you got busted again later in the '60's, is that right?
BISSETT: For possession. It was another big hoopla with a two-year trial. But it was like old times for me. Then things got raging in the '70's when blewointment got a bit more Canada Council support. In 1978, we got a $2,000 increase so we're printing nine books on $6,800.
T: Compared to other publishing houses, that's not much.
BISSETT: It's the fourth lowest block grant in the country. Me and Allen [Rosen] are running seven thousand dollars in debt all the time. You keep hanging in there and conditions eventually improve. The dope thing isn't so heavy any more. No one is frightened by paintings any more. And concrete poetry doesn't scare people so much now.
T: So you more or less survived that era intact.
BISSETT: Yeah. Warren [Tallman] put his house up for me on the second trial for bail. Just incredible really.
T: Do you ever look back on those years in the hospital and speculate how being aware of life and death at such an early age might have affected you? Most kids growing up these days aren't tuned into that. BISSETT: Unless you're in Chile or Vietnam. Yeah, that was pretty bizarre all right. Everything was backwards. I used to get presents before each operation. It was tempting to have an operation, just to get a present. I used to think a lot about dying. And movie stars. That's when I got into movies. It's in my book, Stardust. I used to have movie stars all over my wall. They were my friends. They talked to me. They were closer to me than anything.
T: Do you ever get tired of people asking why you don't capitalize your name?
BISSETT: It's just because there's nothing to emphasize with it.
T: Yeah, I know but—
BISSETT: It's fun when people ask because then I get to talk about
spelling and stuff like that.
T: So let's talk about spelling and stuff like that. You're someone who seems to believe there's a power-mongering segment of society "up there" somewhere so if you spell in a way that's foreign to those people, it keeps the poetry safe. Maybe it's a protective thing. The only people who will read them are people who want to read them.
BISSETT: Yeah, I never thought of that. Wow, far out.
T: They open a book and feel instant irritation. So maybe there's also
a political side of you that wants to provoke a reaction, too.
BISSETT: Far out.
T: Also if you spell phonetically like you do, it gives you an affinity with people who aren't literate. Like children.
BISSETT: Like a lot of people don't spell right. Like maybe two-thirds of the world or something. That's really neat. Those are three super reasons right there, aren't they? Of course the other reason is simply to get words closer to the way they really sound.
T: Have you ever been actively involved in politics the way you're involved in your art?
BISSETT: Not for a while. I used to do a lot of stuff with the Viet Nam war trip. And Ban the Bomb marches. And art auctions to raise money, that sort of stuff.
T: Do you see the pendulum in society swinging back to the right these days?
BISSETT: Yeah, there's a conservative backlash. But that conservative backlash is funny because the revolution never got off the ground. [laughing] We're having a backlash without even having had a revolution. It's very Canadian!
T: Do you think the reaction to your poetry in Parliament is political grandstanding? Or do you think these politicians are genuinely shocked?
BISSETT: I don't know. I find it real puzzling, like a tempest in a teapot. I can't figure out what their motive is. Maybe they think they can mobilize a vote. These five Conservative MP's have written this letter and xeroxed copies of my poems for all their constituents, which may be a copyright infringement. They're trying to get their constituents to write letters to the Council and try and take the autonomy of the Council away. But without the Council, it would be really rough. I'm a taxpayer too, but I don't tell an engineer how to build a bridge. That's going back to Plato and The Republic, right? The only trouble with the Canada Council is that it needs more money.
T: You've said that if you were really writing pornography, you wouldn't need grants.
BISSETT: Yeah. So shame on me for writing what I feel. Why do they get upset about writing? We're not going to be a puritan culture. We're going to have erotic literature as well as any other kind of literature. We're going to have a culture that includes a whole range of experience.
T: Would you agree Canada has a tendency to be liberal about artists just so long as we can ignore them?
BISSETT: Unless you're saying something they can use for their benefit, it's a freak-out. That's the trouble with politicians. I think political activity can be tremendous if it can be communal in some way. Like the world is a commune. Politics should be for getting things together. Like providing guaranteed minimum incomes or fixing things so that senior citizens aren't eating cat food. Or cleaning the water. There are legitimate things that our politicians should be concerned about. Like the defense budget or the food in Super-Valu. Or what the Bank of Nova Scotia and Noranda Mines are doing in Chile, for example. We stood by while Allende got eliminated.
T: Is there any difference for you between where your paintings come from and where poetry comes from?
BISSETT: I think they come from the same place. I approach them both
the same way, feeling what can come through me rather than directing it. Sometimes when you look at a linear or more traditional poem, it might look like it's been worked. But it's still receiving. Like it's an "always learning" thing. I might direct with notation and polishing in different drafts, making it closer to how it really is, but it's still trying to listen and hear and see how it is. To let the poem or the painting become what it is. Like one time I was painting and the brush started dancing. It was really exciting because the figures came alive.
T: Are you aware of a common theme in your painting? Because I notice a lot of your figures are illuminated with a glow, like a sun radiating from out of the figure's inside.
BISSETT: I'm sort of aware. Like when I came out of surgery after my brain thing I started seeing people with auras.
T: Tell me about that accident. What happened?
BISSETT: I was at this party after this concrete poetry show I'd been in. There was a folding door made to look like a wall, so it would blend in. The door was supposed to have a latch, because if you went through it was twenty feet to the concrete. I was leaning against this door and I fell through. Or at least that's what they tell me cuz I don't remember. [laughing] Those cells have gone.
It took two years to get better so we took it to court. The insurance company was bucking it. The thing that came up in court was whether the cat had gone down for its milk or not. They unlatched the door to let the cat down for its milk. So there was this testimony as to what time I had fallen through. If I'd fallen through after the cat had already come upstairs, that would prove I couldn't have fallen through. Even though I did. On that basis, the judge threw us out of court. [laughing] I don't remember any bowl of milk! I never even saw the damn cat!
So they took me to the hospital and took the glass out of my hand. But my brain was bleeding. People from the party had left me there for a while because it was a party, you know. Then they got it together to take me to the hospital. They left me in emergency. Then this shrink came in. He started yelling at me. He thought I was catatonic. I couldn't move so he was taking me to Riverview for shock treatment. I couldn't walk. My hearing would go and then it would come back again. I couldn't say words. I couldn't move. It was really weird. This shrink was bundling me up into a stretcher. I was going off into an ambulance to Riverview. But my brain was bleeding so that would have killed me and stuff.
Then this neurologist who was an intern came in. She was fantastic. She said, "Stop! That's an inter-cerebral bleed." He said it wasn't, it was catatonia. "He's a screwed-up artist and we're going to shock him and rehabilitate him."
So they made a deal. They'd take me to the operating room and go into my brain. If it was an inter-cerebral bleed, then I'd go to a neurology ward. If it wasn't, he would get me. She won.
T: How long were you unable to communicate?
BISSETT: About a week. I was paralyzed on my right side for about three weeks. They sponged up the blood in my brain. I was a staff patient. I didn't have a private doctor. They took me back to a ward and they'd use me as a demonstration for classes. They'd bring in these students and say this is a person who has not got long to live. You see I had aphasia, which means the echoes were not meeting in my head. It means you can't function. Then also I had edema, which is something connected with memory loss. Plus a swelling of the brain or something. And I was paralyzed so I was like a write-off.
T: Could you talk yet?
BISSETT: No. But I got inspired by this neurologist. She was there all the time. There was this light coming from her head. I knew she was on my side. She said my chances were very little but if we really push we could make a good try of it. She said she was the only person there who thought I might live. She wanted me to believe that, too, if nothing else than a joke before dying.
I remember Gerry Gilbert came over one day and they were having this group poetry reading which I was supposed to be part of at the Art Gallery. He wanted to tape me. He said it would be great. My last poetry reading. [laughing] Some other people there at the time got a little uptight. They thought it was a little morbid. I couldn't really handle a reading anyway.
Warren Tallman was so far out. He brought me tapes of Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan. No one could stay very long but nurses would come in and play the tapes for me. It was to remind me that I was a poet. It was so far out. Everything would just go: I couldn't remember who anyone was half the time.
But there was something lucky about it all. The accident happened just after I got out of Oakalla. I'd paid my five hundred dollar fine and done my time. But the federal justice department was uptight. They figured I hadn't been punished properly after the two-year trial, a $500 fine, and a little bit of time in Powell River, and some in Burnaby, and some in the city bucket here, and a few weeks in Oakalla. They were appealing. They had to appeal within thirty days of my coming out. They came to the hospital with the papers. The head nurse told them I'd be dead within a week. So that was that.
BISSETT: Have you ever tried to get in touch with that neurologist?
BISSETT: Yeah. I'm going to try and find her again. She was so incredible. She was maybe twenty-five. To all those sixty-to seventy year-old doctors, she was a toy to them. And I was a dead person. They didn't believe her at all because they'd seen so much. But she just kept believing. Then I got epileptic and started having seizures.
T: And that really convinced them.
BISSETT: I was a complete write-off! A combination of aphasia, edema, paralysis and epilepsy is about it! But she was fresh. She kept working on me. She started bringing me balls to squeeze even though I couldn't move my hand. She would leave the ball in my hand anyway. She said you'll get the idea, you'll make the connection. She was sticking pins in me everywhere. Normally you have one echo test every two days. I had ten tests every day. She came in with these blackboards and taught me the alphabet all over again. She said, if you live your right side is never going to work, but we don't care. She said there's a lot of people worse off than that.
She got me into occupational therapy as soon as she could get me there. There you see people who are so bad off, like in Coming Home. They have so many parts missing from their bodies, or if they have parts there's no feeling cuz their spine got blown away. So you don't get self-pity at all.
She started programming me with my left side. The first day in occupational therapy, it took seven people to get me there. They held me up in front of this ping-pong table. Two guys were sending the ball towards me and they were in worse shape than me! I mean, they had lots missing!
T: I'm sorry. I shouldn't laugh.
BISSETT: [laughing] Well, it is funny. I couldn't laugh but I made gurgling noises. Anyway, two toes twitched one night. My neurologist had this very crackpot theory but she wanted to share it with me. The epilepsy was supposed to mean you're finished, but she figured it might mean there's something that's ticking. She figured with all the electricity it was getting drier in there and a scab was starting to form. So she was getting really excited.
She had me in a sling. She said you're a painter, you're going to keep painting. Enough of this b.s. It doesn't matter what kind of machine we have to make for you to sit in. We can put batteries in you, we can do lots of things.
After the epilepsy, I became spastic. The other people all hung their heads but she and I were getting real excited. At least it was movement. Playing ping-pong, I'd miss the ball and fall on the table. It was a riot. She said rest was fatal. She took my sleeping pills away. She'd say if all you can sleep is four hours a night, that's all your body needs. If there's nothing to do at night, you've got balls to squeeze. Or you can prick yourself with pins.
T: Are you completely recovered now?
BISSETT: Pretty well. I remember the first time I ate in public. It was really far out. I was living with a whole bunch of people as an outpatient. My whole right side was spastic. We had a wood stove. I started to cook some food and everything fell into the fire. I started crying. Everyone freaked out. We lived in this old warehouse and no matter what was going on, I'd always coped. Things used to get pretty raging there. We had this big bolt on the door because we used to get raided and stuff. We'd be smoking outrageous things inside and the cops couldn't get in. So we'd always been crazy there but they'd never seen me like this before. So I had to go out by myself to this restaurant where everyone used to hang out. I ordered food. It was bacon and eggs, the first thing I'd eaten all day. They brought it and I picked up my knife and fork. That was it. It was all over the floor. Little by little I got less and less spastic. I had dyladin for about six months. I had barbells and weights. And I had to type. They would check to see how many hours I spent typing. It was terrible. You'd feel like breaking the typewriter. But it was neat the first time she made me paint. It was so far out. They got me propped up there in this sling from the ceiling. It was a metal thing on a hook. There was paper kept down with masking tape. They taped a brush around my fingers. They pulled this sling back and then they let it go. They had paint on the brush. I would make a mark. Then she'd say you've done your first painting, you're back in business. You could never beat her. So I was really lucky.
T: After all this, you started seeing auras.
BISSETT: Yeah. Hers was the first. But they still thought I would just die in my sleep one night. I got freaked out and crawled out the window once. They found me spastically walking along Broadway and brought me back. She calmed me down and got me inspired again.
T: So do you think your art has come out of this experience to a great extent?
BISSETT: Yeah, a lot.
T: Maybe when you have to relearn almost everything at a later age, you really pare things down to essentials.
BISSETT: It's like a fresh start. You get reprogrammed with a new bunch of cells. [laughing] It's really far out. More people should have it happen.
"Interview"
BISSETT: I was born in Halifax. I started working when I was thirteen and fourteen in record stores. I used to do commercials for one store where I had two characters. I was like a hip young kid and I would push the rock n’ roll and then I had this other voice where I would push classical music and stuff. So it was really bizarre and stuff. And I worked in a gas station. Crap like that.
T: Was your family middle-class?
BISSETT: If there hadn't been so much sickness in the family it would have been like upper-middle-class. But there were hospital debts continually. My mother was sick for years. Then I was sick for three years when I was ten, eleven and twelve. Two years in the hospital, then another year to get better.
T: What did you have?
BISSETT: I had peritonitis. That's when you have an appendicitis operation and something goes wrong. The doctor leaves a hand in, or a glove. I dunno. The poison spreads through your blood and you can't crap. I couldn't go to the bathroom for two years. They put tubes in you so you get these scars.
Now it's so far out because I've been meditating for almost eight months. I worry less, have a more relaxed body system, smoke a little less tobacco, drink a little less coffee. I’m starting to get healthier without going on a head trip. It’s just sorta happening. So anyway, hair is starting to grow on my belly. It’s covering the scars and it’s so far out. Like in Halifax when I’d go swimming they used to yell at me all the time. They wouldn’t play with me sometimes because I had too many scars. [laughing] So I’m getting more confident on beaches!
T: Thanks to some hair on your belly.
BISSETT: Yeah. It took a long time for me to get better. They didn’t think I would live. After the twelfth operation it was okay. I missed two grades and just carried on. I couldn’t do sports for two years.
T: What did you take?
BISSETT: English and philosophy. I was supposed to be a lawyer cuz my father was one. He was a very idealistic lawyer who would take cases from people who couldn't afford to pay. A lot of that. He was never sick so he was always grumbling about doctor bills. That's where everything went. So no one wanted me to be an artist. I think my mother mightn't have minded but she had gone into spirit by then.
T: Were you the eldest son by any chance?
BISSETT: Two daughters and me. Then I wanted to leave Halifax. I used to run away all the time. When I was legal age, I split. I ran away to a circus once. The cops used to always get me back. So I came out west and starved here. Then I got a job with the library downtown and went to UBC. I did two years but I could never finish.
T: When would this be?
BISSETT: Around '64. I'm not sure. Anyway, I remember I was in this other course with a guy named Dr. Daniels. It was a Milton course because they thought I had promise as an English student person. But I didn't have that much promise because there was this seating plan and stuff and I would never sit in my right seat. I couldn't deal with this seating plan at all. There was a lot of other crap I couldn't deal with either. I wanted to write and paint.
[laughing] I remember I had to get this dumb language credit. I was writing this exam for German or something. I didn't like studying that stuff. I'd already bummed out of two other language courses. It was cool but it was weird. So I just put my pen down and walked out of the campus. It was my own little interior drama. I never came back.
T: Did you have many art friends in those days?
BISSETT: No. I hardly knew anybody. I worked at the library and I read. I started meeting other writers and stuff downtown eventually, but I never melted with the university scene.
T: Did you have any books out by then?
BISSETT: No, the first issue of blewointment started in '64, I think. I went directly into that when I left school. In '65, maybe there were three issues. It was a group thing. By '67 we were doing about five books a year. In the' 70' s it's been averaging seven books a year.
T: Where did the impetus to start blewointment press come from?
BISSETT: We started it in the '60's cuz no one else would print us. Visual writing was just too weird for other magazines. I guess that's the way most presses start. You get a bunch of people who are organically together and no one else will print them. It just grows and grows.
T: When you started blewointment, was it the starving artist routine? Eating potatoes and Kraft dinners?
BISSETT: Yeah. Living on welfare and stuff like that. In '66, a movie was made about me called In Search of Innocence. It took about six months with the director, Morris Embra. It was a beautiful movie.
T: Then you got busted?
BISSETT: Yeah, me and this folk singer from Seattle got busted. We were like the second bust in Vancouver. It was really a hot thing. A big deal and crap like that. The social workers were trying to take our child away. The police were coming all the time and I was getting beaten up. It was really getting bizarre. Crap was flying in every direction. The cops would come to bust the place and they'd tear my paintings apart. They would scream, "Why do you paint like this? This is insane!"
One day two social workers came to the door and they bought $800 worth of paintings and told us to get out of town. Or we couldn't keep our daughter. Before that they took our daughter away from us a couple of times. Because she didn't have pants on or something. We got hassled because we were artists.
T: Did you get dragged down by all that?
BISSETT: Well, we understood it all and fortunately we had a really great lawyer, Sid Simons. And Warren Tallman [UBC poetry professor] was a character witness. But like if our daughter walked down to the neighbourhood pool and took her pants off, which all the other kids did, the police would bring our daughter home. We'd get picked on. I suppose the movie we made didn't really help, even though it was a really peaceful movie about writing and painting. But there weren't any hippies yet. They didn't have a word to identify us. They didn't know what we were.
T: Post-beatnik, pre-hippie.
BISSETT: Yeah, they didn't know what destruction we might do. [laughing] All we were doing was painting and writing and living and smoking a little dope. Stuff like that.
T: Who's we? The mother?
BISSETT: Yeah, Martina. We've all gone different places but it's still together.
T: Where do they live now?
BISSETT: Different places.
T: Then you got busted again later in the '60's, is that right?
BISSETT: For possession. It was another big hoopla with a two-year trial. But it was like old times for me. Then things got raging in the '70's when blewointment got a bit more Canada Council support. In 1978, we got a $2,000 increase so we're printing nine books on $6,800.
T: Compared to other publishing houses, that's not much.
BISSETT: It's the fourth lowest block grant in the country. Me and Allen [Rosen] are running seven thousand dollars in debt all the time. You keep hanging in there and conditions eventually improve. The dope thing isn't so heavy any more. No one is frightened by paintings any more. And concrete poetry doesn't scare people so much now.
T: So you more or less survived that era intact.
BISSETT: Yeah. Warren [Tallman] put his house up for me on the second trial for bail. Just incredible really.
T: Do you ever look back on those years in the hospital and speculate how being aware of life and death at such an early age might have affected you? Most kids growing up these days aren't tuned into that. BISSETT: Unless you're in Chile or Vietnam. Yeah, that was pretty bizarre all right. Everything was backwards. I used to get presents before each operation. It was tempting to have an operation, just to get a present. I used to think a lot about dying. And movie stars. That's when I got into movies. It's in my book, Stardust. I used to have movie stars all over my wall. They were my friends. They talked to me. They were closer to me than anything.
T: Do you ever get tired of people asking why you don't capitalize your name?
BISSETT: It's just because there's nothing to emphasize with it.
T: Yeah, I know but—
BISSETT: It's fun when people ask because then I get to talk about
spelling and stuff like that.
T: So let's talk about spelling and stuff like that. You're someone who seems to believe there's a power-mongering segment of society "up there" somewhere so if you spell in a way that's foreign to those people, it keeps the poetry safe. Maybe it's a protective thing. The only people who will read them are people who want to read them.
BISSETT: Yeah, I never thought of that. Wow, far out.
T: They open a book and feel instant irritation. So maybe there's also
a political side of you that wants to provoke a reaction, too.
BISSETT: Far out.
T: Also if you spell phonetically like you do, it gives you an affinity with people who aren't literate. Like children.
BISSETT: Like a lot of people don't spell right. Like maybe two-thirds of the world or something. That's really neat. Those are three super reasons right there, aren't they? Of course the other reason is simply to get words closer to the way they really sound.
T: Have you ever been actively involved in politics the way you're involved in your art?
BISSETT: Not for a while. I used to do a lot of stuff with the Viet Nam war trip. And Ban the Bomb marches. And art auctions to raise money, that sort of stuff.
T: Do you see the pendulum in society swinging back to the right these days?
BISSETT: Yeah, there's a conservative backlash. But that conservative backlash is funny because the revolution never got off the ground. [laughing] We're having a backlash without even having had a revolution. It's very Canadian!
T: Do you think the reaction to your poetry in Parliament is political grandstanding? Or do you think these politicians are genuinely shocked?
BISSETT: I don't know. I find it real puzzling, like a tempest in a teapot. I can't figure out what their motive is. Maybe they think they can mobilize a vote. These five Conservative MP's have written this letter and xeroxed copies of my poems for all their constituents, which may be a copyright infringement. They're trying to get their constituents to write letters to the Council and try and take the autonomy of the Council away. But without the Council, it would be really rough. I'm a taxpayer too, but I don't tell an engineer how to build a bridge. That's going back to Plato and The Republic, right? The only trouble with the Canada Council is that it needs more money.
T: You've said that if you were really writing pornography, you wouldn't need grants.
BISSETT: Yeah. So shame on me for writing what I feel. Why do they get upset about writing? We're not going to be a puritan culture. We're going to have erotic literature as well as any other kind of literature. We're going to have a culture that includes a whole range of experience.
T: Would you agree Canada has a tendency to be liberal about artists just so long as we can ignore them?
BISSETT: Unless you're saying something they can use for their benefit, it's a freak-out. That's the trouble with politicians. I think political activity can be tremendous if it can be communal in some way. Like the world is a commune. Politics should be for getting things together. Like providing guaranteed minimum incomes or fixing things so that senior citizens aren't eating cat food. Or cleaning the water. There are legitimate things that our politicians should be concerned about. Like the defense budget or the food in Super-Valu. Or what the Bank of Nova Scotia and Noranda Mines are doing in Chile, for example. We stood by while Allende got eliminated.
T: Is there any difference for you between where your paintings come from and where poetry comes from?
BISSETT: I think they come from the same place. I approach them both
the same way, feeling what can come through me rather than directing it. Sometimes when you look at a linear or more traditional poem, it might look like it's been worked. But it's still receiving. Like it's an "always learning" thing. I might direct with notation and polishing in different drafts, making it closer to how it really is, but it's still trying to listen and hear and see how it is. To let the poem or the painting become what it is. Like one time I was painting and the brush started dancing. It was really exciting because the figures came alive.
T: Are you aware of a common theme in your painting? Because I notice a lot of your figures are illuminated with a glow, like a sun radiating from out of the figure's inside.
BISSETT: I'm sort of aware. Like when I came out of surgery after my brain thing I started seeing people with auras.
T: Tell me about that accident. What happened?
BISSETT: I was at this party after this concrete poetry show I'd been in. There was a folding door made to look like a wall, so it would blend in. The door was supposed to have a latch, because if you went through it was twenty feet to the concrete. I was leaning against this door and I fell through. Or at least that's what they tell me cuz I don't remember. [laughing] Those cells have gone.
It took two years to get better so we took it to court. The insurance company was bucking it. The thing that came up in court was whether the cat had gone down for its milk or not. They unlatched the door to let the cat down for its milk. So there was this testimony as to what time I had fallen through. If I'd fallen through after the cat had already come upstairs, that would prove I couldn't have fallen through. Even though I did. On that basis, the judge threw us out of court. [laughing] I don't remember any bowl of milk! I never even saw the damn cat!
So they took me to the hospital and took the glass out of my hand. But my brain was bleeding. People from the party had left me there for a while because it was a party, you know. Then they got it together to take me to the hospital. They left me in emergency. Then this shrink came in. He started yelling at me. He thought I was catatonic. I couldn't move so he was taking me to Riverview for shock treatment. I couldn't walk. My hearing would go and then it would come back again. I couldn't say words. I couldn't move. It was really weird. This shrink was bundling me up into a stretcher. I was going off into an ambulance to Riverview. But my brain was bleeding so that would have killed me and stuff.
Then this neurologist who was an intern came in. She was fantastic. She said, "Stop! That's an inter-cerebral bleed." He said it wasn't, it was catatonia. "He's a screwed-up artist and we're going to shock him and rehabilitate him."
So they made a deal. They'd take me to the operating room and go into my brain. If it was an inter-cerebral bleed, then I'd go to a neurology ward. If it wasn't, he would get me. She won.
T: How long were you unable to communicate?
BISSETT: About a week. I was paralyzed on my right side for about three weeks. They sponged up the blood in my brain. I was a staff patient. I didn't have a private doctor. They took me back to a ward and they'd use me as a demonstration for classes. They'd bring in these students and say this is a person who has not got long to live. You see I had aphasia, which means the echoes were not meeting in my head. It means you can't function. Then also I had edema, which is something connected with memory loss. Plus a swelling of the brain or something. And I was paralyzed so I was like a write-off.
T: Could you talk yet?
BISSETT: No. But I got inspired by this neurologist. She was there all the time. There was this light coming from her head. I knew she was on my side. She said my chances were very little but if we really push we could make a good try of it. She said she was the only person there who thought I might live. She wanted me to believe that, too, if nothing else than a joke before dying.
I remember Gerry Gilbert came over one day and they were having this group poetry reading which I was supposed to be part of at the Art Gallery. He wanted to tape me. He said it would be great. My last poetry reading. [laughing] Some other people there at the time got a little uptight. They thought it was a little morbid. I couldn't really handle a reading anyway.
Warren Tallman was so far out. He brought me tapes of Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan. No one could stay very long but nurses would come in and play the tapes for me. It was to remind me that I was a poet. It was so far out. Everything would just go: I couldn't remember who anyone was half the time.
But there was something lucky about it all. The accident happened just after I got out of Oakalla. I'd paid my five hundred dollar fine and done my time. But the federal justice department was uptight. They figured I hadn't been punished properly after the two-year trial, a $500 fine, and a little bit of time in Powell River, and some in Burnaby, and some in the city bucket here, and a few weeks in Oakalla. They were appealing. They had to appeal within thirty days of my coming out. They came to the hospital with the papers. The head nurse told them I'd be dead within a week. So that was that.
BISSETT: Have you ever tried to get in touch with that neurologist?
BISSETT: Yeah. I'm going to try and find her again. She was so incredible. She was maybe twenty-five. To all those sixty-to seventy year-old doctors, she was a toy to them. And I was a dead person. They didn't believe her at all because they'd seen so much. But she just kept believing. Then I got epileptic and started having seizures.
T: And that really convinced them.
BISSETT: I was a complete write-off! A combination of aphasia, edema, paralysis and epilepsy is about it! But she was fresh. She kept working on me. She started bringing me balls to squeeze even though I couldn't move my hand. She would leave the ball in my hand anyway. She said you'll get the idea, you'll make the connection. She was sticking pins in me everywhere. Normally you have one echo test every two days. I had ten tests every day. She came in with these blackboards and taught me the alphabet all over again. She said, if you live your right side is never going to work, but we don't care. She said there's a lot of people worse off than that.
She got me into occupational therapy as soon as she could get me there. There you see people who are so bad off, like in Coming Home. They have so many parts missing from their bodies, or if they have parts there's no feeling cuz their spine got blown away. So you don't get self-pity at all.
She started programming me with my left side. The first day in occupational therapy, it took seven people to get me there. They held me up in front of this ping-pong table. Two guys were sending the ball towards me and they were in worse shape than me! I mean, they had lots missing!
T: I'm sorry. I shouldn't laugh.
BISSETT: [laughing] Well, it is funny. I couldn't laugh but I made gurgling noises. Anyway, two toes twitched one night. My neurologist had this very crackpot theory but she wanted to share it with me. The epilepsy was supposed to mean you're finished, but she figured it might mean there's something that's ticking. She figured with all the electricity it was getting drier in there and a scab was starting to form. So she was getting really excited.
She had me in a sling. She said you're a painter, you're going to keep painting. Enough of this b.s. It doesn't matter what kind of machine we have to make for you to sit in. We can put batteries in you, we can do lots of things.
After the epilepsy, I became spastic. The other people all hung their heads but she and I were getting real excited. At least it was movement. Playing ping-pong, I'd miss the ball and fall on the table. It was a riot. She said rest was fatal. She took my sleeping pills away. She'd say if all you can sleep is four hours a night, that's all your body needs. If there's nothing to do at night, you've got balls to squeeze. Or you can prick yourself with pins.
T: Are you completely recovered now?
BISSETT: Pretty well. I remember the first time I ate in public. It was really far out. I was living with a whole bunch of people as an outpatient. My whole right side was spastic. We had a wood stove. I started to cook some food and everything fell into the fire. I started crying. Everyone freaked out. We lived in this old warehouse and no matter what was going on, I'd always coped. Things used to get pretty raging there. We had this big bolt on the door because we used to get raided and stuff. We'd be smoking outrageous things inside and the cops couldn't get in. So we'd always been crazy there but they'd never seen me like this before. So I had to go out by myself to this restaurant where everyone used to hang out. I ordered food. It was bacon and eggs, the first thing I'd eaten all day. They brought it and I picked up my knife and fork. That was it. It was all over the floor. Little by little I got less and less spastic. I had dyladin for about six months. I had barbells and weights. And I had to type. They would check to see how many hours I spent typing. It was terrible. You'd feel like breaking the typewriter. But it was neat the first time she made me paint. It was so far out. They got me propped up there in this sling from the ceiling. It was a metal thing on a hook. There was paper kept down with masking tape. They taped a brush around my fingers. They pulled this sling back and then they let it go. They had paint on the brush. I would make a mark. Then she'd say you've done your first painting, you're back in business. You could never beat her. So I was really lucky.
T: After all this, you started seeing auras.
BISSETT: Yeah. Hers was the first. But they still thought I would just die in my sleep one night. I got freaked out and crawled out the window once. They found me spastically walking along Broadway and brought me back. She calmed me down and got me inspired again.
T: So do you think your art has come out of this experience to a great extent?
BISSETT: Yeah, a lot.
T: Maybe when you have to relearn almost everything at a later age, you really pare things down to essentials.
BISSETT: It's like a fresh start. You get reprogrammed with a new bunch of cells. [laughing] It's really far out. More people should have it happen.
"Interview"
