SOURCE: "Not in Time," in Brick: A Journal of Reviews, No. 23, Winter, 1985, pp. 5-18.

Nichol is a Canadian poet. In the following excerpt from an essay that was written in 1971, he examines Bissett's attempt to evoke human breath in poetry, points out the influence of Gertrude Stein on his work, and discusses his resistance to conventional grammar and spelling.

in the early sixties out of the creative writing programme at ubc the tish group emerged with their insistence upon a poetry whose visual notation on the page was linked to & inseparable from the poets breath how you see it on the page is as score for how it should be read here they have brought the poem back to the music of the human body its breathing & reunited it with music from which for so long it seemed to have strayed

at the same time out of the...