Back in No Time ─ The Brion Gysin Reader

Brion Gysin (1916-1986) was a visual artist, historian, novelist, and an experimental poet credited with the discovery of the 'cut-up' technique -- a collage of texts, not pictures -- which his longtime collaborator William S. Burroughs put to more extensive use. He is also considered one of the early innovators of sound poetry, which he defines as 'getting poetry back off the page and into performance.' Back in No Time gathers materials from the entire Gysin oeuvre: scholarly historical study, baroque fiction, permutated and cut-up poetry, unsettling memoir, selections from The Process and The Last Museum, and his unproduced screenplay of Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch. In addition, the Reader contains complete texts of several Gysin pieces that are difficult to find, including "Poem of Poems," "The Pipes of Pan," and "A Quick Trip to Alamut."

One of the first Fulbright Fellows, BRION GYSIN was recognized for his book, To Master - a Long Goodnight, with its substantial appendix, A History of Slavery in Canada. His career as a visual artist began before the age of 20; he was part of the famous 1935 Surrealist Drawings show in Paris, though at the orders of André Breton his work was taken down. His paintings are owned by MOMA, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Paris's Pompidou Center. Jason Weiss is a New York-based writer and author of Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers (1991).