SOURCE: "Visual Poetry in Canada: Birney, Bissett, and bp," in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1977, pp. 252-66.

David is a Canadian editor and writer. In the following excerpt, he analyzes several of Bissett's concrete poems.

For Bill Bissett, 1962 was the year that he first "allowed the words to act visually on the page." Most noticeable, initially, about Bissett's poetry is his peculiar orthography, described by Frank Davey as "idiosyncratic quasiphonetic spelling" which is part of his "attempt to write of an unqualified, elemental, and pure visionary world" as well as "a symbolic act of social rebellion." For example, Bissett spells "the" as "th", "and" as "nd", and "some" as "sum". Bissett defends his way of spelling by observing that "as recently as 17th century," there was "no consistency in spelling rules." He wonders why poetry has "to be / lockd in th structure of 17th c. / bourgeousie stuffd...