by Carl Peters

A lecture relating directly to textual vishyuns: image and text in the work of bill bissett was presented in Special Collections at Simon Fraser University on November 14, 2012

1. A Writing Inside Writing

“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” as poetry shows; criticism works the other way: its responsibility, as Gertrude Stein contends, is to comprehend (and to show how) “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (“Poetry and Grammar,” 231). The artist chooses to do and say whatever she or he likes. A critical writer reading a work of art does not have that freedom. The artist is responsible for the work. The critical writer is responsible not only to the work being viewed, being read, but also to both its ontology and its aesthetic context. These responsibilities to the artistic work are what is lacking in all critical writing on bill bissett’s art to date – of which there is little – and what is available says pretty much the same thing, time and again. Darren Wershler-Henry writes:

The most problematic aspect of bissett’s work, in fact, is that his poetics have not changed much in over twenty years. Since the closing of blewointmentpress and bissett’s subsequent move to publish with Talonbooks, the format and content of his texts have slowly stabilized. The drawings, paintings, and typewriter concrete poems still appear, but have a sanitized feel within the perfect-bound, desktop published, properly literary digest-size confines of Talon’s editions. Although his writing has been comprehended by a computerized environment bissett has not continued to push against the limits of that field in the same way that his earlier work pushed against the limits of earlier publishing technologies (the typewriter, letraset, mimeographs and small printing presses). Even his idiosyncratic, never-quite-phonetic spelling has become systematic to the extent that it is not only possible to read it as a signatory style (“this looks like a bissett poem”), but also in that it has become an affectation among many younger poets to imitate that style without regard for its implications. In its current incarnation, bissett’s writing is the canonical anticanonical text.

(122)

That was in 1997. derek beaulieu, in 2010, writes:

bill bissett’s work – for the past several decades – has been problematic. His lyrical voice is complicated by complex idiosyncratic orthography. His concrete poetry intersperses dense typewriter-driven grid pieces with diagrams of ejaculating phalluses. Most problematic is the frequency of his books. Talonbooks has published a new bissett volume every 18 months for decades, and it has come to the point where the consistency of voice and style have made it difficult to differentiate one volume from another – they all blend into “bill bissett’s new book.” I remember the first time that I saw bissett perform – I was awestruck by the combination of poetry and song; script and improvisation; speech and incantation. A few years ago I saw him again. And that was the problem. This later performance – and the one after that (and the one after that) – was the same as, or almost indistinct from, the first one. Much like his books, his performances had taken on the role of “bill bissett performance” instead of exploring where he is now. Sadly, in 2010, bissett’s books and performance upon repeated exposure become the work of an overwrought maraca-wielding hippie who’s overplayed LP is caught in a groove.

2. Junk/Art/Oracle [or The Mediology of the Arena]

bissett’s early assemblages are anthology-like [works], but they also are “sets”; they partake of drama, and what is dramatized is a consciousness in relation to its boundaries – an encounter with nature morte – a benign ignorance (in Keats’s sense of a negative capability) engaging a benign nihilism. But his seeming efforts as an anthologist are constantly and consciously undermined; although bissett’s many texts are often recycled, made out of past texts, the new work often subverts and destroys the earlier work, thus negating its origin and transitory ontology. The assumptions underlying the constructions of all of his past work undergo a process of constant revision. It is impossible to know where any given work begins or where it will end, and this is precisely the point. The work itself negates the notion of archive, commodity, and all things static, fixed. bissett’s brilliant “watching    broadcast nus” serves as an illustration here, as the poem enacts a critical deconstruction of manipulated assumptions – of rhetorical “static”;

     watching    broadcast nus
     i see th salmon talks will
                            resume on monday
     well thank god   at leest th
                               salmon ar talking

The poem, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, “[tackles] Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage limiting the excessive valuation of the imaginary … and, on the contrary, [reflects] in more detail on the fundamental psycho-acoustic situation” (19–20). In addition, Peter Sloterdijk opines, “I would like to suggest that the mirror stage be replaced by a siren-stage. The theorem of the mirror-stage is certainly the most famous point of Lacan’s oeuvre, but it is also the weakest – for this reason we should, if possible, reformulate the great impulse that this theory contains in a constructive manner” (20). This idea of the excessive valuation of the imaginary fits into my restlessness with the postmodern “excessive” valuation of “representation” over depiction.¹

For bissett, television already functions as a sort of garbage dump or waste land, and fragments from it constantly find their way into his writing and art. Here, the poet himself is the subject-as-witness watching (i see) “th / salmon talks will / resume on monday.” Jacques Rancière: “The virtue of the (good) witness [reader/viewer] consists in the fact that he is the one who simply responds to the double blow of the Reality that horrifies and the speech of the Other which compels” (“Intolerable,” 93).

As a found text, “watching    broadcast nus” effectively conveys the critical epiphany experienced by the speaker “watching.” Both the “broadcast,” as well as the poem, underscore a disjunctive field (if not a contradiction) between what is seen and what is actually read or heard and ultimately understood. What is seen here is simultaneous with what is heard. “well thank god,” thinks the speaker of the creative space opened up by, or within, this disjunctive field. bissett’s imagination of the archival is significantly fluid and anarchic.

3. Aesthetics and Language

“watching    broadcast nus.” (“Literature is news that stays news.”) That is bissett paying close attention to language out there – and elsewhere; but each text, it seems, is also the inner voicing of what can be perceived made flesh (made sensible – sensual). Here is another extraordinary example:

     eye went down 2 th beech
     last nite  lookin  n an invisibul
     vois sd  its not xcellent
     4 me  2 be ther
     ium no  fool
     i walkd back  home
     immediatlee ²

The poem draws an elementary distinction between authorship – the will to self creation and working with the creative will – and the “other” of that, which is “writing” as mere painting is “representation.” Anyone can write but authorship, creating a world and living in it, is something very different than “writing.” We live in a feudal age (a dark age, an impoverished space) and we recoil from its savagery. The tyranny of theory has destroyed the capacity to think “parasitically” – the being inside and outside and not being sucked into the counterfeit. (It was easier once but not now.)

4. From Point to Plane

The discontinuous line is, then, bissett’s iteration of the breath-line of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” “The breath // is continuous.” We will come back to this.

5. On the Pathetic and Lyrical State of Mind

bissett presents us with an idea of space as positive (all space is equal), as fluid. This spatial idea is neither intellectualized nor aestheticized; it is always acted on within a shifting and transformative figure-ground relationship. bissett’s ideal space is an inclusive, proprioceptive space: “so the paintings then become meditation objects that we can gaze on while we meditate; the interplay of colour and shape, rhythm, form, design, energy, life and for me, one way to be part of that field is layers and layers of strokes” (“what th painting sees,” 7).

This new (“modern”) conceptualization of the self, in other words, constructed and made out of other selves, is analogous with the modern work made out of “layers and layers of strokes.”

“On the one hand, then,” to revision Rancière’s insight slightly, “the sign [the mark (a priori or before the fact of the)] is valuable as a liberating power, pure form and pure pathos dismantling [in its a priori or existential condition] the classical order of conventional (mainstream) narrative/s.³ On the other, it is valuable as the factor in a connection that constructs the figure of a common history. [Signs, images, and forms reference and lend context to other images and forms visually and/or ‘other.’] On the one hand, the work of art is its own reality while on the other it is an operation of communalization (between signs [‘layers and layers of strokes’] and ‘us’)” (“Sentence,” 34). What interests one is the way in which, by drawing lines, arranging words, or distributing surfaces, one also designs divisions of communal space. It is the way in which, by assembling words or forms, people define not merely various forms of art, but certain configurations of what can be seen and what can be thought, certain forms of inhabiting the material world.

6. standing with th fire

standing with th fire – bill bissett (Collection of Jonathan Rainbow and Michel Potvin)

7. “what th painting sees”

Why do we think that bissett’s paintings look “primitive”? Because what he offers us – what he forces us to confront – is a visceral (elemental) engagement with visual language, thus situating the reader/viewer at the primitive edge of experience: the unknowable. In other words, the illusion of a linear, continuous, representation of time is constantly broken up in them, undermined and subverted, by the material fact of the painting – its “meditative” and transforming self-referentiality. standing with th fire (c. 1997) is an excellent example of this. We observe a figure – it is both human and animal, male and female – against a dark or darkening ground. The figure is not explicitly separated from this ground, for, as we have already come to see, bissett’s paintings do not operate according to the conventional pictorial logic of foreground, middle ground, and background. The figure stands “with” the fire suspended in a powerful matrix of transforming (ambiguous if not abstract) space; it appears just there, one with the fire, created simultaneously with it, ethereal, transitory, and ephemeral – fleeting. The figure is not so much illuminated as illuminating, emanating its radiance – its energies – which are its own. This figure is in absolute possession of itself; pure in itself; like fire – ever expanding with every breath and brush with the living air which not only surrounds, but actually penetrates it.

standing with th fire offers readers a pedagogical view into bissett’s developing art. The left side of the painting seems to want to be a more Classical, representational work – it embodies a more representational use of space: the figure firmly set in its place before the background; yet we observe on the right-hand side an astonishing detail – an astonishing “event”: the left arm and a good deal of the side of the figure merging with the more abstract expressionist background of the painting. The expressionist quality of the painting brings to mind the works of Kandinsky, Kirchner, and Kokoschka.

The painting achieves its absolute “being-ness,” its immediacy, fullness, and excess through contrast – through a kind of counter-diction. bissett ingeniously and intuitively juxtaposes clean, defined lines and dabs of colour with painterly abstract expressionist space. Architecture emerges out of this contrast with the gestural and the painterly: the figure seems to hover and shine within its own architecturally designed and structured niche. Drawing and painting literally merge; the one is not the interior super-structure of the other. As with all of bissett’s art, this has a pedagogical implication. In art school one is taught drawing before painting because, in classical painting, drawing brings the subject or content of the picture into existence – everything else is merely predetermined contextualization, decoration, or elaboration. This is not the case in most works of art that are considered “modern”: drawing and painting happen at the same time, cancelling out each other’s potential determinism; the image is not structured solely by one sketch, (often preceded by the preliminary sketch), but is more often a radical juxtaposition of the two techniques. The artist is thus free to exhibit the awesome power behind the gesture in the process of its own creation and making. This, indeed, was Pollock’s contention and praxis and we see it here once again in bissett’s re-poeticization of the living, breathing image and mark.

8. Painting in the Text

Elaborating on T.S. Eliot’s doctrine of de-personalization, Marcel Duchamp writes: “The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation: through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale” – the painting cum “meditation object” (138–39). The end result resituates the viewer, apposite the author, directly with the work. The genius of modernism does not reside in the author’s intention or “self-expression,” but in the material expression of its forms. It is not even a critique of those forms, but a continual building-up and tearing down of them. Once again, this new ethical position of the modernist subject is summed up by Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” his most lucid critique of the classical author and the reauthorization of the reader attentive to material form:

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

(56)

The sense of alchemy in the creative act that Eliot describes extends to the very material with which bissett paints; acrylic, a form of plastic, “is in essence the stuff of alchemy,” as Roland Barthes notes (97). ”More than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible. And it is this, in fact, which makes it a miraculous substance: a miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature. Plastic remains impregnated throughout with this wonder: it is less a thing than the trace of a movement” (97). This already has a certain implication for the figures we observe in all of bissett’s paintings. These figures are “mediumistic beings” (Duchamp, 138). Most often they seem made out of flame. standing with th fire is a magnificent painting (and I use the word “magnificent” specifically in its etymological sense of “proud”).⁴

9. The Idea of Art

Consider any of Andy Warhol’s underground films – from Sleep (1963) to Empire (1964) to any of the Screen Tests series. Like Stan Brakhage’s work; these films encourage the viewer to experience a different sort of time-image relationship – to experience a different category of time altogether. This is an experience of time that is more similar to the experience of reading rather than it is to “watching,” because the films themselves are closer to paintings, and one reads a painting differently than one watches a mainstream film. Brakhage’s time-image films demand a different kind of consciousness.

Modern art appeared to open possibilities for new forms of art and experience; Virginia Woolf referred to this moment when – and others said something like it – we awoke in the twentieth century to a different world. What happened? And why do we assume that this created a new spectator and new reader who would appreciate the consciousness of these changes? (“The virtue of the [good] witness [reader/viewer] consists in the fact that he is the one who simply responds to the double blow of the Reality that horrifies and the speech of the Other which compels.”) Reflected in painting, graphic design, film and literary works these changes reveal a turn away from nature to “things” and objects; put another way, this meant that self-creation and perceptions of reality were placed under devastating artistic scrutiny.

10. Poetry and Cinema

Eye Myth – Stan Brakhage (1967)

Stan Brakhage’s 1967 short film Eye Myth is pure cinema (the phrase is argumentative), and pure cinema privileges vision over any other perceptive faculty. In pure cinema, it is the eye that takes in sound. This kind of aesthetic – a sort of listening with the eyes – also leaves nothing out [“watching    broadcast nus”]; everything enters in constantly, continuously – transformed by radically changing, if not explosive, space. This radically explosive space is plural space, and can be traced back to cubism – cubist space opens up figure-ground space into multiples of space – no one multiple is any more important than any other. Recall the opening scenes of Robert Altman’s Nashville. They evoke, too, Brian De Palma’s utilization of the split screen; the split-screen technique, although it has its basis in collage, is a more minimalist form of juxtaposition or apposition.

One of bissett’s favourite films is Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. In the movie, a “movie-character” steps out of his “picture” and into real life. The film is not unlike the confrontation with reality a painting like René Magritte’s The Human Condition establishes. Like Magritte’s other work, The Treachery of Images (1928–29), images “lie” illuminating both image and text – illuminating “form.” The “picture” is its own reality. This dynamic or drama is the plot of the movie. The plot is as simple as they come: the viewer “of” the film called The Purple Rose of Cairo watches other viewers – the audience “in” the film The Purple Rose of Cairo – watch a movie called The Purple Rose of Cairo. We’ve seen this before. Gertrude Stein offers us a similar narrative: “Exact resemblance to exact resemblance.” ⁵

First. The composition, because the way of living had changed the composition of living had extended and each thing was as important as any other thing. Secondly, the faith in what the eyes were seeing, that is to say the belief in the reality of science, commenced to diminish … the joy of discovery was almost over. Thirdly, the framing of life, the need that a picture exist in its frame, remain in its frame was over. A picture remaining in its frame was a thing that always had existed and now pictures commenced to want to leave their frames and this also created the necessity for [modern painting].

(Picasso, 12)

William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s method of the cut up helps explain Magritte’s picture The Human Condition. Cut-ups in text enable an interaction of the elements of syntax that is inhibited by the application of conventional constraints of linear grammar to language. In a sense, cutting up the text only more clearly reveals the “hidden” (edited, stitched together) fragmented nature of discourse. Cut-ups also ultimately challenge the absolutism of the conventional subject, opening a door, in a Burroughsian way, beyond narcissistic perceptions.⁶ With the cut-up, you displace the “you” [“your-self”] that has been constructed by the very grammar/discourse you’ve now critically fragmented. That is liberating. As Régis Michel points out, “the value of art ceases to be a value and becomes an exchange value – a social value – which no longer has any value in and of itself” (xv).⁷ Today, the dominant delivery systems allow the vanguard to do anything it wants; but it is not visionary like Brakhage, who discovered for himself techniques coming out of hand-eye skills like we see in Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Maya Deren and Hollis Frampton.

Brakhage’s experiments in film approximate bissett’s in paintings; Brakhage’s films utilize a similar technique of “molecular dissolve” – the phrase is bissett’s.⁸ The image in many of Brakhage’s films is often scratched over or scratched out altogether, leaving only a trace or traces – a semblance of an image and not a resemblance. A faint trace of the now-underlying image always offers a bit of context; but the image itself is nearly lost – dissolved – within a radically transformed ground of line upon line, line after line. (Many of the images in bissett’s limited edition lunaria bear this resemblance to Brakhage’s films.)

Brakhage makes the point that “myth” comes from “mouth”; in many of bissett’s portraits the mouth is open, drawing the viewer’s eye into another picture or “myth.” Like Brakhage, bissett often “writes over” his texts. Inside and outside are blurred; figure-ground relationships destroyed; consequently, one is no more important or privileged than the other. The work, then, like a film in its literal sense, becomes a continuous loop.

11. living with th vishyun [or Thinking Informally]

“evreewun shud b publisht.” – bill bissett

“I do not publish authors. I publish texts.” – Karl Siegler

“bill bissett discovered that art is a twenty-four hour job long before Lady Gaga.” – Jean Baird

12. The Misadventures of Critical Thought

Peters: bill, what book or books of yours do you work from most? How is your past work a source for current work? (How does the past leak through into the future of art?)

bissett: th sours uv th current n present book 4 me is th book ium writing now not from a previous book veree interesting qwestyun n th pome ium working on now is th pome ium working on now its sours is not from a previous pome iuv nevr thot uv that whn a book is dun its / dun i moov on

“There is no need to present yourself as a visionary … Having an openness to great questions is already sufficient. In my eyes, if you behave somewhat properly in your defencelessness [or benign ignorance] before the great themes, and thereby make a contribution to the de-idiotization of the ‘I,’ this is totally enough entirely” (Sloterdijk, 28). Indeed, this might also be said of some psychoanalysts, but that is a lesson for another day. Or, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell asserts, “As soon as we begin to philosophize we find … that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given.”

Against the misadventures of critical thought bill bissett’s whole art, and the egalitarian ideals his work embraces, offers us the gift of “liberating doubt.” ⁹

13. Irony & the Iconic

Dear Prof. Peters

I enjoyed the discussion today on bill bissett’s poetry. The poems that we talked about – the way they look on the page and the way the sound – I didn’t know that you could write like that; I mean, the questions posed open up what writing is or can be – I’ve never thought to push the envelop this way. Well, I am still having some problems of my own; bissett’s work challenges the reader indeed. You singled out Len Early’s introduction; and I look forward to reading your book on bissett. I wonder though if you could recommend some writing by bissett’s contemporaries – I intend to draw some comparisons. You mentioned bpNichol today and I will start there, too.

Thank you for your help. Looking forward to talking with you soon.

Take care,

Dear Carl,

bill bissett is a wild man! I understand your comments today about the Shaman. What is bill’s story? Why does he write the way he does? Also, I was wondering if you would accept as a term paper one written in the style of bissett?

Thanks, see you soon,

Hey Carl,

Really enjoyed the poetry today. What else has bissett done? Never heard anything like it.

Cheers,

Hey,

Never read poetry that looks like this before. Am completely lost. What do you suggest I do to get help?

Forlorn,

Very weird writing. Did he always write this way? Perplexed,

I’m totally lost after today. What should I read?

Is he 4 reel? Seriously,

Hey. Don’t get ths stuff @ all.
Do I have 2 write my paper on ths stuff?

I don’t get it.

Don’t get this.

What? Huh? Txt me back.

Footnotes

1. See Cornelius Castoriadis’s critique of Lacan in “Psychoanalysis, Project and Elucidation” in Crossroads in the Labyrinth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984).

2. In his 2006 Nobel lecture, Orhan Pamuk articulates the introspective foundation of authorship. He says, “A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.”

3. Consider further this modification of Rancière’s insight apposite the “objective experience of creation” or “pure creation” (bpNichol in “The ”Pata of Letter Feet, or, the English Written Character as a Medium for Poetry”).

4. Etymologically: ‘To furnish with a vault or arched cover.

5. See Gertrude Stein portrait of Picasso “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.”

6. “It is significant that Burroughs should cite Eliot’s The Waste Land as the first great cut-up – acknowledging his debt to a writer who came to understand his culture via exile.” (Gentleman Junkie: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs, by Graham Caveney, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, NY, Toronto & London, 1998 (22–23).

7. “[In] this industrial production of media rubbish the value of cultural goods ceases to be a value and becomes an exchange value – a social value – which no longer has any value in and of itself: any value at all. It is something between artifact, accessory, and fetish. Something probably far from meaning, pleasure, and experience. In this totalitarian aesthetic of reification (we can just as easily say cultural thing), the individual is no longer a subject, not even a consumer, hardly a surrogate: in his [or her] turn, he [or she] becomes a cultural product, entirely subject, in his [or her] social behaviour, to the same norms as the works, which are abstract norms (canons, models, codes)” (Michel, xv).

8. More can be done on the history and etymology of this phrase in art and literature (as an inquiry into metaphysics). See chapter four in textual vishyuns on “molecular dissolve” and Adamic language. “Thought is molecular” (Deleuze in Sinnerbrink, 201).

9. See The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell:

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find [. . .] that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

(156-157)

WORKS CITED

Barthes, Roland. “Plastic.” In Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers, 97–99. London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1987.

beaulieu, derek. “Pulled off My Shelves #2.” Lemonhound (blog) November 25, 2012, <http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2010/10/pulled-off-my-shelves-2-bill-bissetts.html>.

bissett, bill. “eye went down 2 th beech.” In sublingual, 36. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2008.

———. “watching broadcast nus.” In scars on th seehors, 5. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1999.
———. “what th painting sees.” Cabaret Vert Magazine 3 (1993): 7–9.

Duchamp, Marcel. “The Creative Act.” In Marcel Duchamp: Salt Seller: the Writings of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, 138–40. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975.

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 47–59. London: Methuen, 1960.

Michel, Régis. “Alibi?” In The Severed Head: Capital Visions, xv–xxii. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” In Selected Writing, edited and with an introduction by Robert Creeley, 15–30. New York: New Directions, 1966.

Pamuk, Orhan. “My Father’s Suitcase,” translated by Maureen Freely. In Nobel Lectures From the Laureates, 1986–2006, 1–16. New York & London: New Press, 2007.

Rancière, Jacques. “The Intolerable Image,” translated by Gregory Elliot. In The Emancipated Spectator, 83–105. New York: Verso, 2011.

———. “Sentence, Image, History,” translated by Gregory Elliot. The Future of the Image, 33–67. New York: Verso, 2009.

Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Sinnerbrink, Robert. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. New York: Continuum, 2011.

Sloterdijk, Peter and Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs. Neither Sun Nor Death, translated by Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011.

Stein, Gertrude. If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso. November 27, 2012. <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/ifitoldnew.html>.

———. Picasso. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960.

———. “Poetry and Grammar.” Lectures in America, 207–46. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

Wershler-Henry, Darren. “VERTICAL EXCESS: what fuckan theory and bill bissett’s Concrete Poetics.” Capilano Review 2:23 (Fall 1997): 117–23.