Bissett's poetry and that of the blewointment coterie is meant to sound like street language, the language of the people in the street, albeit the severely limited vocabulary of a narrow-minded and elitist neighbourhood. Indeed, bissett's and the others' poetry sounds like the talk of people who would be the least interested in the written word—illeducated, arrested adolescents suffering from imaginative fatigue and an OD of imported, second-rate American plastic. What is so ironic about bissett's Anti-American rhetoric is that he is one of the most American poets that we have, in his obsessions and approaches to poetic technique, and with his warmed up left-overs of 60's American counter-culture. Reading bissett and his gang is like sitting down to a meal of Coke and corn-chips. (p. 88)

Dermot McCarthy, "Shit from Musturd," in Essays on Canadian Writing (© Essays on Canadian Writing Ltd.), No. 6, Spring, 1977, pp. 86-9.∗