The Last Blewointment Anthology, Volume I

Lorne Bellamy was a graduate student in the English Department at the University of British Columbia.

In October 1963, bill bissett and friends, having no place to publish their work, decided to put together the first issue of blewointment magazine, which then continued for five years, until 1968. Thereafter, bissett published unnumbered special issues, or anthologies, at irregular intervals, and more and more books of poetry, often helping previously unpublished poets into print. Selecting his materials for The Last Blewointment Anthology from all three sources, bissett includes sound and concrete poetry, short to medium-length lyrics, and many drawings to represent blewointment’s achievements from 1963 to 1983. He also adds about ten new poems (so-called “mystery entries”) from poets who, in one way or another, have worked with him before.

As yet incomplete, this anthology includes only those poets whose names fall between AC and LE in a library card catalogue. (The second and last volume is due in the fall of 1986.) As is the case with many anthologies, the space allotted to each poet, except to bissett himself, is minimal: nearly fifty poets are represented on 110 pages. Although each page (8½” x 11”) is big enough for several short lyrics and occasional drawings, bissett does not have enough space to spread a poet’s work over time. Nor does the alphabetical listing allow us to witness a gradually increasing collective experiment with the visual and aural properties of language. In his “Introduction,” he briefly mentions his desire to subvert the rules of grammar and to do away with the “bloks rectanguls” in which poems were often printed, preferring instead “articulate space btween th words for paus measur vizual presens.” One wonders when these and other ideas — about “how to stretch present what is,” for example — took hold and how they affected the making of poetry during bissett’s years with blewointment, but the form of this anthology, ironically, frustrates any sense of process, of continuity in time.

As is fitting for a blewointment anthology, bissett’s work is given a prominent place: nearly 20 poems, including concrete and incantatory poems, political satires, several short lyrics, graphic designs, and a meditation. His tone ranges from subdued anger to quiet longing to reverence for a transcendent world to which he safely returns, “finding pees / in the fire / blessing getting thru / anee ice.” Other poets, such as Milton Acorn, Margaret Avison, and Earle Birney, finding in their own work an affinity with bissett’s compassion for victims of political oppression, with his spiritual questing, and/or with his experiments with poetic form, sent poems to blewointment magazine; these poems appear in this anthology as well. Unfortunately, these early contributions, in addition to poems by bissett and Margaret Atwood, are far superior to most of the others in this anthology; too often the language and the rhythms of many poems are spoiled by clichés, by clusters of abstractions promoting favoured causes or benefits, and by self-conscious straining for wit and vision.