Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1939, Bill Bissett headed for the opposite coast of Canada as soon as he could. The son of Frederick William and Katherine Hamilton Covert Bissett, he left for Vancouver in late 1957, after spending one year at Dalhousie University. Vancouver has remained his home base ever since, except for some time spent in the British Columbia interior with a commune and time served in Oakalla Prison on a drug possession charge in the late 1960s. Bissett worked briefly at a variety of odd jobs--as a ditch digger, disk jockey, bean picker, English tutor, sign painter, gas station attendant. Sometime in the early 1960s, he and Martina Clinton had a daughter, Ooljah. From 1963 to 1965 he attended the University of British Columbia, where he took a course from Warren Tallman, but he soon dropped out and became part of the downtown poetry scene which was beginning...