Review: What Fuckan Birthday? Loot Bag by Various // Jeremy Luke Hill

So, bill bissett turned 80 years old recently, and some friends threw him a party. Given that the party was for bill bissett, they called it What Fuckan Birthday. They even convinced the grocery store to write this on the cake, which, if you’ve ever had discussions with grocery store bakeries over the use of profanity on a cake (and I have), you’ll know is quite an accomplishment.

Aspart of the festivities, guests were invited to bring 80 copies of a favourite bissett poem or a poem written in bissett’s honour. The idea was that they would perform these pieces and then include them in “loot bags” that people would take home after the party. The guests, being the kind of people influenced by bissett and his creativity with language, made the most of this invitation, creating a fantastically eclectic collection of art objects that formed a kind of improvised and limited-edition publication.

The loot bag came in an envelope created by Gregory Betts of semanti$press and was imprinted with a bissett poem. It contained photocopies of favourite bissett poems, a little foldout booklet by Cameron Anstee of Apt.9 Press, a chapbook by Derek Beaulieu of the literary arts program at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, a QR code card by Christian Bök of CrO₂Press, an oversized broadsheet by your truly of GordonHill Press, and more. The complete list of contributors is below:

• “Bissett Bissett Bissett” was made by Cameron Antsee
• “a birdsay / birthday / cell bray shun” was made by Gary Barwin
• “what theory” was made by Derek Beaulieu
• “placetos” was made by Gregory Betts
• “Mona Lisa Noir” was made by Christian Bök
• “Bill Bissonnette” is a poem by Franco Cortese
• “The Body” was made by Jeremy Luke Hill
• “A particular coming & going” was made by Karl Jirgens
• “veronika” was chosen by Adeena Karasick
• “WON 4 bill bissett”!” is a poem by Penn Kemp
• “ium writing this poem so i don’t start” is a poem by Donato Mancini
• “th swans uv etobicoke” was chosen by Honey Novick
• “blank envelope” was made by Kathleen Reicheld and Wes Rickert
• “Crossing Directions” was chosen by Eric Schmaltz
• “okay, cats. xcelent.” was made by Kate Siklosi and Dani Spinosa

This little improvised loot bag represents perfectly what I appreciate about experimental poetry at its best, and what I’ve always responded to in the work and the ethos of bissett himself—that is, a tremendous openness to the possibilities of language and to the varieties of human experience that these possibilities imply.

Like bissett’s own work, the loot bag’s poems take on a wide variety of forms, even one (my own) that literally couldn’t fit inside the envelope. This variety, by its very existence, participates in a resistance to formal restrictions and an insistence on the playfulness of language that continues bissett’s own legacy, which worked constantly against social expectations, moral narrow-mindedness, and official censorship.

And we still need that gesture so badly. The expectations and narrow-mindedness and censorship that bissett first set himself against have shifted and changed, of course. They have in many cases become less official, but they haven’t gone anywhere, have sometimes even formed among those who claim his influence. There are undoubtedly more avenues for experimental writing in Canada than there were when bissett began blewointment press in 1962, but even a quick survey of Canadian writing today will show a distressing tendency to sameness, an entrenched unwillingness to take on risk, a fear of anything that doesn’t seem to fit in the envelope.

So, I celebrate the What Fuckan Birthday? loot bag, like I celebrate the life of bill bissett, because they serve to remind us that we need to expand our openness to what literature can be, to the kinds of lives that it can express, to the kinds of experiences that it can include. I may not love everything in the envelope. Some of it may not be what speaks to me. But I’m glad that there is room in it (and out of it) for all of our contributions to be included.

Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press, a literary publisher based in Guelph, Ontario. He is also the Managing Director of Vocamus Writers Community, a non-profit community organization that supports book culture in Guelph. He has written a collection of poetry and short prose called Island Pieces, along with several chapbooks and broadsheets. His writing has appeared in ARC Poetry, The Bull Calf, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, paperplates, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Rusty Toque, The Town Crier, and The Windsor Review.