SOURCE: "Animate Imaginings," in Canadian Literature, No. 66, Autumn, 1975, pp. 94-7.

In the following excerpt, Doyle discusses the connection between Bissett's formal approach and his poetic vision.

Bill bissett's … mixture of chant-poems, visual concretes, and commitment poems, always offered with engaging energy, is very familiar. The shapes of the poems (in the mouth, in the eye) fix one's attention, the personal phonetics and typo-orthography and the absence of "careful libran". Again one notes the absence of venturesome syntax (a strong preference for the declarative sentence) but perceives it in a different universe, not of thought, but meditation, here in many instances on the soul, "yr soul twind around th orange ths time".

Many of the "soul" pieces are shape poems, based on the single word, apparently exploring the soul's (physical?) dimensions. Others ("soul", and other) are based on a mantra-like line repetition, which is often also visual. Still others...