I Want to Tell You Love

A Critical Edition

bill bissett, Milton Acorn, Eric Schmaltz, Christopher Doody

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781773852324
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

bill bissett and Milton Acorn are two of Canada's most significant, and most controversial, literary figures. In the 1960s, bissett's renown as an experimental poet was growing as his social and political concerns were stirred by the voice of the counterculture. Acorn, inspired by socialist theory and imagism, was building his reputation as a poet on the margin who ran against the grain of the literary establishment. Both were rising towards cultural prominence—one, a true beatnik and the other, a certifiably rugged lyric poet. In 1965 they came together in a remarkable collaboration, a challenge to the established literary tradition and a call for a better world.

Published for the very first time, I Want to Tell You Love is the combination of bissett and Acorn's seemingly incongruous poetics to confront the turbulent and swiftly changing world of the 1960s. A collection of poems and illustrations, it is a window into the lives and motivations of two soon-to-be-canonized cultural figures. I Want to Tell You Love is a work of friendship, a shared vision of resistance, and a mutual longing for a better world.

This critical edition offers the manuscript in its intended form alongside contextualizing scholarship in a significant contribution to literary history. I Want to Tell You Love offers an opportunity to reevaluate the nature and scope of Canadian poetry during a critical time of national cultural awakening.

Contents

Critical Introduction by Eric Schmaltz

Influences and Self-Definitions

The Vancouver Sixties Poetic Milieu

In Vancouver: Milton Acorn and bill bissett

A Textual History

Thinking in Mosaics

Afterlives

Notes

Bibliography

I Want to Tell You Love by Milton Acorn and bill bissett

Afterword by bill bissett

dissimilar apertures uv consciousness:
An Interview with bill bissett

“Th Caruso Pome” by bill bissett

Editorial Rationale

Explanatory Notes

Editors’ Emendations

Later Publication and Emendation List

Index of Poems by Title

Acknowledgements

Index

Critical Introduction

Eric Schmaltz

“Lover that I hope you are . . . Do you need me?”

—Milton Acorn

I Want to Tell You Love documents the significant, but little known, collaboration between two of Canada’s most illustrious and controversial literary icons as they navigated the broad social and political turbulence of the 1960s. Soon after they met in Vancouver, avant-garde poet and painter bill bissett and working-class People’s Poet Milton Acorn combined their seemingly incongruous poetics to present a vision of resistance and transformation they titled I Want to Tell You Love. The book is composed of words and images: thirty-nine poems by Acorn, twenty-two poems by bissett, and ten drawings by bissett. Each of their contributions is distinctive and compelling, and some of these poems will be familiar to readers acquainted with the authors. However, when joined in this dialogic context, the significance and meaning of many of these poems is renewed and consequently revised. Their collaboration confronts a historical moment of instability, stimulated by broad social changes around the globe and the well-spring of utopian ideals known as the North American counterculture movement. When they met, bissett and Acorn were enmeshed within a series of social and political movements and events at home and abroad, including responses to the ravages of the Vietnam War, the Quiet Revolution’s 1960 call for cultural secularism, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1963 assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, and the spectre of nuclear war. Concomitantly, these urgent episodes were complemented by countercultural activities, which prompted a revolution in social norms that altered the cultural fabric of North American life, including its music, dress, sexuality, family values, and attitudes toward drug use. These revolutionary stirrings figure as both a response to the social and political changes underway as well as a reaction against the culture of conformism that dominated North America in the 1950s. Acorn and bissett, then, in a few words, were working together during a turbulent period, characterized by the promise of an emergent culture and the seeming threat of the Cold War. The complexity of this moment and the vitality of the 1960s manifest in I Want to Tell You Love.

In its intended form as a collaborative book, I Want to Tell You Love has never been published until now.1 In the past, editors and publishers were unable to see the congruities between the authors that exist across the book, which now seem like an almost logical partnership. Acorn and bissett submitted I Want to Tell You Love to several publishers, including Raymond Souster at Contact Press and Fred Cogswell at Fiddlehead—all of whom rejected the submission for one reason or another (see “A Textual History”). The most illuminative rejection notice was sent to Acorn on 28 March 1966 by J. A. Rankin, Editor of Trade Books for McClelland and Stewart (M&S). In her letter, Rankin reports that M&S’s readers enjoyed many of the indiv...