griddle talk
a yeer uv bill n carol dewing brunch
For 52 weeks, bill bissett and Carol Malyon met for brunch and conversation at the Golden Griddle in Toronto.
This sustained conversational encounter between Carol Malyon, who writes within the objective bounds of standard English usage, and bill bissett, one of contemporary writing’s most exotic practitioners, working with the visual forms of language in his own non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, produces, as if by accident, invariably astonishing social, moral and ethical critical insights. Each of these writers’ particular uses of language—the most radically different in contemporary literature—consistently foregrounds and interrogates the cultural origins of “common” perceptions that too often remain hidden and undiscovered in the dictionaries we search for “common” meaning: proof positive that each person’s perception of life’s most fundamental questions and answers is almost never shared, and is always and only ever subject to translation, even among those who “share” the same language.
Here is what they talked about:
Trouble and the Self
What is Forever
Does Belonging Exist
Luck and Life
We Need Not Hold Our Experiences Against Life
Is There a Script
The Role of Mysteries in People’s Lives
Time
Free Will and Wider Wiring
Families
God &/or the Loved One and Individual Freedom
Mortality and the Jigsaw Puzzle of Replicating a Parent in a Lover
Why “Shoulds” are No Good
Delusional Relationships
The Chemistry Metaphor
Censorship and Propaganda
True Love
Fact or Fiction—Where’s the Line
Do We Invent Everything We Go Through
Is Rationality a Costume
Can We Influence Larger Book Sales
Maybe We All Want to Move to Sweden
Just for Today I’m Confused About Religion
Tax Reform
Predictability
Stage Fright
Carol, What Is It
Them
Know Thyself and the Writer’s Delusions
Wondering What about the Stars and Our Friends
Childhood Versus Later On
Real Life—Does it Really Exist
All Those Prayers—Where are They Going, Exactly
Meaninglessness
Time and Relativity
Each Day We Wake Up and Realize They’ve Given Us Another Day
Everything is Answered
The Questions in Our Lives—the Balance, and What’s Peripheral
Dogs Give Unconditional Love, Why Can’t People
originalee from lunaria ovr 300 yeers ago in lunarian time sent by shuttul thru halifax nova scotia originalee wantid 2 b dansr n figur skatr became a poet n paintr in my longings after 12 operaysyuns reelee preventid me from following th inishul direksyuns
— bill bissett
bill bissett garnered international attention in the 1960s as a pre-eminent figure of the counter-culture movement in Canada and the U.K. In 1964, he founded blewointment press, which published the works of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, among others.
bissett’s charged readings, which never fail to amaze his audiences, incorporate sound poetry, chanting and singing, the verve of which is only matched by his prolific writing career—over seventy books of bissett’s poetry have been published.
A pioneer of sound, visual and performance poetry—eschewing the artificial hierarchies of meaning and the privileging of things (“proper” nouns) over actions imposed on language by capital letters; the metric limitations imposed on the possibilities of expression by punctuation; and the illusion of formal transparency imposed on the written word by standard (rather than phonetic) spelling—bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance and has consistently worked to extend the boundaries of language and visual image, honing a synthesis of the two in the medium of concrete poetry.
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