breth: new bill bissett collection his largest

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ISBN: 9781772012262 | softcover

$29.95 | 544 pages | Pub. Date: 2019
6 W × 9 H × 1.5 D inches
Poetry | Frontlist | Bisac: LCO006000
ISBN 13: 9781772012262 | Rights: WORLD

breth
 

th treez uv lunaria: selektid rare n nu pomes n drawings, 1957–2019
By bill bissett

breth presents both new and selected poems from legendary Canadian sound, visual, and performance poet bill bissett. bissett’s innovations have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and have stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. This new collection, bissett writes,

“shows sew manee threds thru poetree n langwage btween n thru lyrik sound song vizual narrativ non narrativ his her storikal naytur humour sexual romantik politikul metaphysikal spiritual fuseyun th pickshur image in th lettr th shape uv th lettr in th drawing line orchestrating th needs 4 caring n heering n being with each othr all th drama uv all uv us lerning why n how creating thru art n th bizness uv life a much mor free n equitabul societee b r e t h contains manee storeez uv being ther n getting ther n uv th love uv art n each othr th sharing times n th losses in our journeez 2 b helping each othr n th planet erth nobody owns n thru art manee ways uv lifting ourselvs with kleen watr erth fire n air n love ths b r e t h is abt thees adventurs uv sharing physical being n love spiritual n touching th manee ways art poetree can take us byond th gift n prison uv self in2 th manee worlds in n uv ths beautiful galaxee n ourselvs uttring th sounds in th images n lettrs n lettrs 2 manee passing comets n ourselvs spin th reel dreem xchanging love 4 love our manee selvs on fire our gifts 2 each othr n ourselvs that evreewun has enuff ths time uv th sun n th lite in th dark touch th sun in time with joy n sorrow lerning n unlerning langwage n poetree can show we join with ourselvs n each other.”

This volume, the largest in bill bissett’s publication history, includes more than a hundred illustrations and visual poems, many of them appearing in print for the first time, as well as a foreword by fellow poet Tim Atkins (author of Folklore and On Fathers < On Daughtyrs), a bibliographical “a r c h i v e,” and an index of poem titles.

"[bill bissett is] that rarest of literary figures: a countercultural icon who continues to compel and confound."
—The Toronto Star

There are a lot of a-holes on the CanPo scene - and I've known many of them. But bill bissett is something different - a nice guy poet who's also genuinely creative, supportive of other poets,  a small press publisher, a great visual artist, AND . . . he published my first non-selfpublished collection, Unacknowledged Legislator, with his blewointmentpress in 1981. bill is still rocking poetry into his 80s - me, my poetic licence expired with the PurdyFests  :  )-

- Chris

Canada Day pride: a Canadian (me) coined term EQ in 1984

Yep, we Canucks have invented and created a lot of cool things: insulin, poutine, hockey, basketball,  the snow blower, the snowmobile and the Nanaimo bar. Sometimes we don't get the credit we deserve, though, so here's my claim to inventing the concept of EQ, emotional quotient, as a corollary and balance to the concept of IQ. 

Saturday, 14 March 2015

I invented EQ in 1984

Dear Daniel Goleman,

I was listening to a CBC radio broadcast tonight where you were discussing your many books on emotional intelligence. It reminded me that I first used the term EQ, in the context of emotional intelligence, in my widely published poem, "Five Minutes Ago They Dropped the Bomb" (1984). I listened to the program hoping to learn the genesis of your creation of this concept, & was reminded that you began publishing on this topic a full decade after my poem had been published. Very likely this is a case of 'great minds think alike' & all that, or parallel discoveries, like Edison/Tesla, or perhaps basically the time was ripe in the zeitgeist for such a social/psychological connection to be made & articulated.

Anyway, I thought you might be interested in my poem - as an oft-starving poet, it's a thrill that some of my ideas have entered the culture, whether overtly through my writing or through parallelism or serendipity,  but sometimes I wish I'd benefited a bit more financially & credit-wise  ;  )

emotionally & poetically yours,
Chris (Faiers)

zenriver@sympatico.ca 


Five Minutes Ago They Dropped the Bomb


After the bomb dropped
the homophobic cop
and the steambath patron he was handcuffing
melted into each other's arms
into infinity

After the bomb fell
concrete angels in all the graveyards
took wing
Every bell in the world
gave one last high-pitched ring into oblivion

Five minutes ago
a tear or two slipped in the halls of karma
at the insignificant passing of
3rd. dimensional existence –
3rd. stone from the sun – reality factor
time factor irrelevant –
total dissolution of creatures
   IQ 100     EQ 35
evolutionary phase median ape to bodhisattva

The bodhisattvas wept
Buddha watched mountains raise their final crest –
burst into pulverized space/time

Basho's spirit watched every moment in nature
cruelly bloom into the final haiku moment of infinity

Five minutes ago
the Marxists got their final synthesis
the neo-nazis their final solution
the capitalists their last boom from the economy

Five minutes ago we kissed
said "Shit! They've done it …"
Armageddon - Apocalypse

Five minutes ago Time Must Have a Stop
five minutes ago we passed into borrowed time
five minutes multiplied 12 times by the hour
24 times by the day
365 times by the year
and 38 times since Hiroshima shimmered into oblivion

Five minutes ago we passed into borrowed time again
reality factor minus:
3 million
994 thousand
and sixty

five minutes ago
 

- Chris Faiers  (1984)



Author's note: this poem was multi-published in 1984 -
in the chapbook of the same title,

in "The Unfinished Anthology" (Unfinished Monument Press),

in "Anti-War Poems: an anthology" edited by Stephen Gill (Vesta Publications),

& I believe in "The Americas Review".

It was republished in "Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era", Allan Briesmaster and Steven Michael Berensky, (Seraphim Editions, 2008).

War-era poets share experiences
Toronto Star review of "Crossing Lines" by Joe Fiorito   


Flipping thru anthologies and books which have included my poems, today I discovered several more credits for this poem.

Foot Through the Ceiling, 1986, Aya Press (now Mercury Press)  collection for which I received the inaugural Milton Acorn People's Poetry Medal in 1987

The Last blewointment Anthology, edited by bill bissett, 1985, Nightwood Editions

Keeper of the Conscience (anthology), edited by Ronald Kurt and Mark McCawley, 1990, Greensleeve Publishing

Other Channels (anthology), edited by Shaunt Basmajian and jones, 1984

Waves (magazine), Vol. 13, No. 1, Fall 1984, pages 76 - 77

Piping at the End of Days: A book of Overcoming (anthology), edited by Katherine L. Gordon, 2017 Valley Press, Rockwood, Ontario

Did my poem invent "IQ/EQ" corollary?

Another key aspect of this poem was psychological. I come from a quirky, even negative for me, nuclear family. Likely both my father and brother have 'genius' IQs, and in my early years I felt intimidated by anyone who was overtly 'smart'. But as the years went by, I realized my father hadn't been very supportive of me, and I've since come to suspect he exhibited a high degree of narcissism (now labelled narcissistic personality disorder).

So I invented a corollary to IQ in this poem, "EQ", emotional quotient. as another benchmark for understanding human behaviour. A decade after I multi-published Five Minutes Ago They Dropped the Bomb I was browsing a bookstore in Belleville, Ontario. I came across a best seller titled something like EQ: EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT. Had some academic read my widely circulated poem and then appropriated my intellectual property? Unless some author comes forward and admits to this, I'll never know. But the chronology is suspicious.



Wikipedia claims first published use of EQ in 1987 in British Mensa Magazine

The first use of the term "emotional intelligence" is usually attributed to Wayne Payne's doctoral thesis, A Study of Emotion: Developing Emotional Intelligence from 1985.^{[11][citation needed]} The first published use of 'EQ' (Emotional Quotient) seems to be by Keith Beasley in 1987 in an article in the British Mensa magazine.^[12] However, prior to this, the term "emotional intelligence" had appeared in Beldoch (1964),^[13] Leuner (1966).^[14] Stanley Greenspan (1989) also put forward an EI model, followed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1989).^[15] The distinction between trait emotional intelligence and ability emotional intelligence was introduced in 2000.^[16]

1 comment:

angelee said...

Dear cricket,
this is a powerful.poignant and significant poem .
Did Daniel Coleman ever reply to you?
You should be credited by Wikipedia for EQ ,
a term which is bandied about much more than IQ now.
Love and light,
angelee

20 April 2017 at 18:34

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The Secret Handshake Summer Group Art Exhibition

Hi bill,

Great as always to hear from you  : )-  I've put the poster for the art exhibition on my blog:

http://riffsandripplesfromzenrivergardens.blogspot.com/

I can't believe half a century has slipped by so quickly for me. It was mid-June 50 years ago that I left the U.S. to avoid serving in the Vietnam War and ended up living on the streets of the UK for 3 years. Here's the posting I did a couple of days ago to remember:

Glad to see you're still active on the art, politikal and poetry scenes. I've mostly been taking a break since the PurdyFests ended after 8 years in 2014, just doing some blogging and lots of gardening and hikes by the river.

peace & love  :  )-
Chris


p.s. please say hi to Carol Barbour from me. She was in "Small Press Lynx", an anthology I co-published with Mark McCawley (rip) in 1990.