This image is the cover for the book Back in No Time

Back in No Time

The first anthology of writings by the brilliant avant-gardist: “A valuable book that makes accessible an artist too long considered a cult-eccentric.” —Publishers Weekly

Born in 1916, Brion Gysin was a visual artist, historian, novelist, and 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 defined 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, this 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.”

Brion Gyson, Jason Weiss

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).

Wesleyan University Press