This month we bring you a very special guest curator edition of SpokenWeb's Audio of the Month. In this minisode, host Katherine McLeod is joined by SpokenWeb researcher and postdoctoral fellow Mathieu Aubin for a glimpse into the life and work of canadian poet bill bissett - from poetic surveillance to an Avant-Garde dinner fit for a Queen.
Each month on alternate fortnights (that's every second week following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode) - join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb's Audio of Month mini series.
An extension of Katherine's audio-of-the-week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favorite audio each month to the spokenweb podcast - so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
Listen to Mathieu Aubin's Audio of the Week featuring an audio clip of bill bissett on CKVU-TV September 1978 here along with links to recordings and works mentioned in this minisode: https://spokenweb.ca/bill-bissett-on-ckvu-tv-september-1978/
Produced by: Katherine McLeod, Mathieu Aubin, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland.
00:00
Music:
[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
00:10
Hannah McGregor:
Welcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that's every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb's Audio of the Month miniseries. We'll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. This month, we are excited to share a special guest curator edition of the SpokenWeb minisodes from SpokenWeb postdoctoral fellow Mathieu Aubin. Without further ado, here's Katherine McLeod and Mathieu Aubin with SpokenWeb's Audio of the Month: 'mini' stories about how literature sounds.
01:03
Theme Music:
[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]
01:03
Katherine McLeod:
For this Audio of the Month, I'd like to introduce you to a special guest who will be guiding us through a variety of recordings of Canadian sound poet bill bissett. Our guest is Mathieu Aubin, a SpokenWeb postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University. So how did this Audio of the Month come about, you might ask? Well, Mathieu started by pitching an idea to the Audio of the Week series, and if you're a SpokenWeb researcher and an audio clip catches your attention, please do get in touch and your audio clip could become part of the Audio of the Week or even an Audio of the Month. Now, what was it that caught Mathieu's attention? He was conducting an oral history interview with bill bissett and bill started telling him about "that time when he had dinner with the queen." Yes, had dinner with the queen. That caught my attention, too. But to get to that part in the story, let's hear, Mathieu set the scene through sound.
02:08
Mathieu Aubin:
This month, I have the pleasure and privilege to be your Audio of the Month curator. As your curator, I'll be introducing and briefly discussing three audio clips documenting a decade in bill bissett's life. As you may or may not know, bissett is a visual artist and award-winning gay poet who has published over 50 books. He was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, November 23rd, 1939, and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, 1958. There, he co-created blewointment magazine and blewointment press, which published visual, concrete, and sound poetry. Though bissett is now an iconic poet, he faced many difficulties during the late 1960s and the 1970s. For instance, in the late 1960s, when Vancouver narcotics police officers raided counter-cultural communities, bissett was arrested for possession of cannabis. You can hear about this experience in the recording of the poem "another 100 warrants" read during the Sir George Williams Reading Series on October 31st, 1969. Let's listen.
03:11
Audio Recording:
[Audio, bill bissett reciting "another 100 warrants issued"] Another hundred warrants issued. News flash. Seven men entered a Vancouver graveyard only to disappear in a flash of white light. What's it like, oh straight person, square-jawed, to be able to shop around save three vets from the Army & Navy without being stalked, harassed, etc. by the narcs at every turn you take. Hey, what's it like to get up in the morning, gathered, you and your friends, close ones, around the warming stove without the RCMP crashing through the veils within the embargo of mistrust. Canada, etc.
03:45
Mathieu Aubin:
Experiences such as these with the mounties and narcs were documented by other poets in Vancouver, such as Sharon Thesen in her poem "Chrysanthemum Perfume," which is discussed by our sister podcast SoundBox Signals in their episode "Only the Imagination Carries Forward." Though he was freed from jail with the help of UBC English professor Warren Tallman, bissett remained on the local police's radar. This forced him to spend many of the 1970s living in secrecy while continuing to run his blewointment press, publishing his work with presses such as Talon Books. In 1977, bissett's poetry was debated in the House of Commons because Conservative MPs cited his work as evidence of the Canada Council's misuse of public funding. That year, bissett's Canada Council funding was heavily reduced, causing members of Vancouver's literary community to come together and defend their friend. In last month's Audio of the Week post titled "bill bissett on CKVU-TV September 1978," we hear an example of these efforts. In the recording from the PennSound collection, a partner affiliate of the SpokenWeb research network, we hear Pia Shandel, then-host of The Vancouver Show, document what had happened to bissett as he chants in the background and reads the poem “th wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police.”
05:03
Audio Recording:
[Audio, bill bissett reciting “th wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police”] The wonderfulness of the mounties, our secret police. They open our mail, petulantly they burn down barns they can't bug. They listen to our political leaders phone conversations. What could be less inspiring to overhear? [Audience Laughs] They had me down on the floor til I turned purple, then my friends pulled them off me. They think breastfeeding is disgusting. Every time we come here to raid this place, you always have that kid on your tit. They tore my daughter's doll's head off looking for dope. One of my more memorable beatings was in the backseat locked inside one of their unmarked cars. They work for the CIA. At night, they drive around and shine their searchlights on people embracing and with their PA systems, tell them to keep away from the trees. They listen to your most secret farts, rewinding the tape, looking for hidden meaning. Indigestion is a national security risk.
06:13
Mathieu Aubin:
In the poem, the speaker documents the mounties surveillance tactics, such as opening people's mail, recording phone calls, expressing heterosexist comments, and physically attacking him. While I've thought about this decade in bissett's life for many years and I've met with him on several occasions to talk about this time in his life, when we last spoke, he shared a surprising twist to the story. In an oral history interview with him, I shared with bissett that Pierre Elliot Trudeau, then-prime-minister, was apparently upset about the accusations against the Canada Council. bissett was surprised when I told them this as he recalled attending a dinner at Ottawa's Château Laurier hosted by Trudeau and attended by Queen Elizabeth II. The dinner was supposed to be a showcase of Canada's Avant-Garde artists, including writers like bpNichol, Carol Bolt, Michael Ondaatje, and bissett himself. As bissett told me this story, I learned that his life of being pursued by the Vancouver police and the mounties, living in secrecy, and facing homophobic attacks in the House of Commons had as a counterpoint an experience of dining with the queen and explaining sound poetry to her. Oral histories can be incredible sources of twists and turns. I'm thankful that I've been able to have so many fruitful conversations with bissett and that he shared this story with me. Here is a story by bissett about him and his friend Carol Bolt, author of the play One Night Stand, meeting the queen sometime in the late 1970s. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I did when I first heard this story.
07:49
Audio Recording:
[Audio, bill bissett] There were a lot of beautiful guys there.
07:52
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Mathieu Aubin] Mhm.
07:52
Audio Recording:
[bill] And the queen... Carol Bolt was there. She had gone to bed early for a person and she wrote a great play called One Night Stand.
08:05
Audio Recording:
[Mathieu] Okay.
08:05
Audio Recording:
[bill] And it got a lot of performances all across Canada. And she wanted to meet the queen. I was wearing a powder-- no, I was wearing a blue tuxedo with a powder blue shirt, frills going down the middle of it.
08:25
Audio Recording:
[Mathieu] I can picture it, yeah.
08:25
Audio Recording:
[bill] And I just loved it. I just... I was so happy and no one had gotten anywhere for me to spend the night, I'd forgotten about that. Everyone else, don't know.
08:35
Audio Recording:
[Mathieu] Yeah.
08:35
Audio Recording:
[bill] And so anyway, so I wasn't worried yet. And so I was bringing Carol Bolt over to meet the queen. Like Pierre Trudeau, she's really short. And I was taller than her as well. And I said, "Your majesty, I'd love you to meet Carol Bolt. And she's the author of a wonderful Canadian play called One Night Stand. Do you know what a one night stand is?" And she said, "Well, not now, but I did." And then Carol disappeared. I said, "Good heavens, she's disappeared."
09:12
Audio Recording:
[Mathieu] Yeah.
09:12
Audio Recording:
[bill] And.. no, it was the queen that said, "Good heavens." I said, "Oh my God, she's not here. She got so shy she ran away."
09:19
Audio Recording:
[Mathieu] Aww.
09:19
Audio Recording:
[bill] She couldn't do it. I understood that. And so then she said, "Well, what do you do?" She said to me. I said, "I do sound poetry." And she said, "What is that?" I said it was poetry that the main emphasis is on sound and, you know, just make sounds. The sounds are the enchantment or the experience--
09:42
Audio Recording:
[Mathieu] Yeah.
09:42
Audio Recording:
[bill] --rather than the meaning. And she said, "Oh, that sounds very interesting." And then the queen was going to leave after, a little while after that... We've been reported a sniper in the lobby or something. And then Carol came back and she said, "I can do it now. I took a deep breath." I said, "Okay, let's go." And so I went after the queen and I touched her on the shoulder, which you're not allowed to do.
10:04
Audio Recording:
[Mathieu] [Gasps] Oh!
10:04
Audio Recording:
[bill] Her skin was like smooth--
10:05
Audio Recording:
[Mathieu] Yeah.
10:05
Audio Recording:
[bill] --like smooth. And I said, "Your majesty, Carol's here!" She said, "Oh, blessings, you've reappeared! How excellent," I mean, she was very festive.
10:17
Audio Recording:
[Mathieu] Aww.
10:17
Audio Recording:
[bill] And it was, yeah, it was a lovely evening.
10:21
Music:
[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
10:26
Katherine McLeod:
That was bill bissett in conversation with Mathieu Aubin. My thanks to Mathieu for suggesting these audio clips from SpokenWeb, PennSound and an oral history interview conducted as part of Mathieu's postdoctoral SpokenWeb research. Find out how to listen to all of these recordings and more by visiting spokenweb.ca. Thanks to Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland for working with me to produce this minisode. My name is Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.