Driving mr. bill

th buk uv lost passwords 1
by bill bissett

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025
$24.95 / 9781772016932

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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This is a review written in the image of a road trip that took place back when I was mr. bill’s driver. In memory, it was a cool autumn day not too long after Matt Cohen died. 

The CBC radio broadcaster said everyone loved Cohen, and puzzled as well that Cohen, who won the Governor General’s Award for his novel Elizabeth and After (1999), hadn’t seemed to have known. Cohen’s posthumous memoir, Typing: A Life in 26 Keys, was newly on shelves. In it, he described how he had never been accepted by Canadian literature.

We were driving north that day. The radio was on, because we had just climbed the hill out of Clinton onto the plateau and were able to catch the radio tower at Mount Begbie, a volcanic plug thirty klicks ahead of us. bill loved to keep up with the news. You can’t do that in the Fraser Canyon, or up the Thompson, but then, suddenly, you can again, so I turned the radio on.

I think Cohen’s words hit home. bill had been criticized sharply himself for breaking social norms. I went on tour with one poet who repeatedly called him a fake. I’m going to guess that the comment might have been made from other feelings of exclusion, given that they’re pretty common in Canada.

This book should set that mis-reading to rest. The publisher calls it a “novel.” I’d say, it’s a bit of a road trip with bill.

It was a beautiful day on the Cariboo Plateau, hardly winter at all, just like this year, and bill was happy to be back home in his “special place.” In those years, he was well known as a poet and artist in Vancouver and Toronto. The Cariboo, though, had been just for him, for thirty years. He had a community there, but not a literary one, and you’d never find his cabin if you didn’t know it was there.

bill, though, had never heard of Mount Begbie, so I told him about the Boeing engineer Mike Duffy. Mike had been driving the photographer Chris Harris all around the Chilcotin to create his book Spirit in the Grass, which I had just finished editing. Mike loved to tell how when he had first climbed Mount Begbie and had seen the entire plateau stretching out around him, with only pines, firs and aspens in any direction, he left Seattle and moved to the plateau immediately.

That touched a chord in bill. And we had time. I had budgeted for ice conditions. Because of clear roads, we were ahead of schedule. We didn’t want the trip to end, either, so we agreed to stop and climb the mountain. 

It’s not a big hill. It only takes twenty minutes to get up, but given how flat the plateau is, it might as well be Denali. You can feel the wind of the turning of the Earth up there. Well, you can anywhere on the plateau, but you really think about it up there.

So, that’s what we did. We walked up to the microwave tower and radio repeater on their volcanic plug and looked out over the world in a thin sun. I pointed out the Centre of the Universe above Vidette Lake to the East. 

“Can we go?” asked bill.

“Some other day,” I said. But we never did. 

Life’s like that. You take the moments you get, and hope for more. We did once take the long way to Vancouver, so bill could think about retiring in Little Fort on the North Thompson. For a man who has always claimed to come from the planet Lunaria, Little Fort fit. In those days, downtown Little Fort was an ice cream shop and an outdoor UFO Museum and a gas station. We checked all three out.

The whole way up Mount Begbie in December 2000, though, we talked about Matt Cohen. bill was upset at what he had heard: that this great writer had felt like an outsider.

It’s not that bill didn’t believe Matt. We talked about that, up there as the microwaves and the CBC signal (no doubt) zoomed through us. We were choked up. It was cold on the hill, too, but we even so were in no rush to get down.

What bill talked about was his dream. th buk uv lost passwords 1 is that dream. It’s a dream of touching people. Everyone. And the world. Which is a person, too. Even bill’s drawings are touch. His paintings are made out of gentle finger strokes on canvas. Through touch, bill makes a world. 

bill had just written his famous poem about salmon talks. There are always salmon talks, but there were more than usual then, with new threats from fish farms and disease, and new opportunities for profit and loss. The talks were always a knot of federal, provincial, Indigenous, commercial, international and sports-fishing arguments, with industrial fish farming and environmental peril thrown in. 

Up there in the wind off the great Pacific gyre, bill recited his salmon talk poem for me:

watching   broadcast  nus

i see th salmon talks will
                  resume on monday

well thank god  at leest th
                     salmon ar talking

And now, from this new book, I’ve learned how central the poem is within bill’s work. As he demonstrates over and over here, everything is talking. These words we’re using, that’s not the real talk. For humans, they are just a way to get towards touch. For the language (a character itself), it’s the same, but through us. The book is built on this notion.

“I wish,” bill said, mourning Cohen, “that when we all get together for literary panels, we could just love each other. We’re all poets. I could listen to a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet read and explain afterwards, ‘that’s how I do it,’ and all the rest of us could go ‘Oh, yeah,’ and nod, then I could read something, and they could say, ‘Wow, so that’s how you do it,’ and clap. Then you could read and tell us how you do it and we’d say, ‘Wow, that’s cool!’ And then a formal poet could do it, too. We’re not competing with each other.” 

That was bill’s dream. But, of course, it’s not always the way it is. There’s a lot of competition in the poetry world, but as bill pointed out on the mountain, at least the salmon are talking. 

Now, after a quarter century of gestation, in th buk uv lost passwords 1, bill’s dream about the place of literature in the world has been laid down clearly. The book adds a reverence for non-individual personalities. Humans and language talk here, free of constraint by individual selves. Selves even go as far as becoming images, to escape the constraints of language. They are environments. 

When bill reads, he creates a charged space by chanting and shaking a rattle. That enhanced excitement is here throughout the book, too. Whenever words confuse some passion, bill speaks physically instead, leading his mind, and ours, through the marks made to shape letters, or a finger drawing in the fog on a window, or smears of lipstick on a mirror, leaving a message that is written in a reflection of a face looking into the pool of another face.

They are all part of a rupture with received language and a rapture of body and language coming together, and that’s coitus: intercourse, from the land for “coming together” or “meeting.” In bill’s conception, self and body cohabit in one soul and speak body and self to each other. 

But is this a novel? Maybe, in the way of Fosse and Handke, those oh-so-poetic Europeans. More importantly than definitions, narrative here is slowed down to a dazzle of surface marks, and the bulk of words are individually spelled, like this, in “from i remember when”:

   iud like 2 go 2 a rivr a lake an ocean n sit n
look out n feel th rivr how long she sd i don’t think
uv seqwens n it follows in th ordr that th narrativ
  cums up n i was rite there n i saw all uv it goin
  on n i cudint stop anee uv it reellee

The linkages between words in bill’s work often come from the side effects of such ecstatic markings. I mean, look at some alternate readings suggested by the text: “IUD,” “ocean-ing,” “sit-ting,” (a nice pairing), “she sad,” (from ‘she sd’, in place of “she said”), “sequins” (a bright display in place of the duller ‘sequence’), order as narrative command, and then the homoerotic closure from there. It’s narrative, yes, and right down to the level of the formation of words—and that’s poetry.

It all raises an interesting notion. If these lyrics are a novel, it is because a large narrative connects the more intimate links between the texture of reading and the ordering that book pages command. That larger narrative is grounded in the root of joined selves speaking as one, while also coming up individually in motion with language.

I’d call that “things opening from themselves:” not so much a narrative of character as a journey, a kind of walk up Mount Begbie, a kind of spiritual comedy. It’s not about coming down from that high. And what do you know, halfway through the book, bill speaks this dream as clearly as can be: “knok knock its yu. knok knok its me n ium yu.”

The landscape that follows it is a landscape of conception.

Classically, images putting landscape in human shape might be seen through a lens of human entitlement, but for bill the union is complete. He wants us to adore each other, and to do so without shame, and he says just that as the book approaches its falling action:

(*) (*)_ (*) (*) there’s not enuff violins 4 our specees <> <> <> <>

Every life needs a soundtrack. This is bill’s.

Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has reviewed recent books by Garth Martens, Diana Hayes, Mary Dalton (ed.), Gary Geddes, Tom McGauley, W.H. New, Stephanie Bolster, Lorne Daniel, Sharron J. Simpson, Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, and Hari Alluri for BCR. His newest volume, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster