[1] The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) says that "Watson ushered in an avant-garde in Canadian theater years before the rear guard had fully emerged.

"In Edmonton the Watsons became part of an active circle of writers and established the literary magazine,The White Pelican in 1970 along with Douglas Barbour, Stephen Scobie, John Orrell, Dorothy Livesay, and artist Norman Yates.

The Studio Theatre became an important venue for the production of Wilfred Watson's plays, beginning with Cockcrow and the Gulls (which he'd written in the mid-1950s) in March 1962.

Trial of Corporal Adam was produced in 1963; Wail for Two Pedestals in 1964; a centennial play, O Holy Ghost, Dip Your Finger in the Blood of Canada, and Write, I LOVE YOU in 1967; and the satire Let's Murder Clytemnestra According to the Principles of Marshall Mcluhan in 1969.

[3] During the 1970s Watson returned to poetry, publishing The Sorrowful Canadians and Other Poems in 1972, I Begin with Counting in 1978, and Mass on Cowback in 1982.

[3] On its appearance, Canadian critic Northrop Frye called it "typically formal poetry, mythical, metaphorical and apocalyptic."

Frye was admiring: "We feel that even a line as breath-taking as 'When in her side my eyes were but blind seeds,' or a phrase like 'the tomb egg broken,' is merely what fits the poem at that point: brilliant as the imagery is, there is no costume jewellery.

The form combines numerals and letters, using "a vertical grid of 9 numbers with 17 slots for words, syllables or phrases.

By stacking the grids, Watson writes a "score" for the performance of multivoice poems which exist not on the page but in transformations from visual to auditory forms.".