Interviews Through Time, and Selected Prose. Roy Fisher. Kentisbeare, U.K.: Shearsman Books 2000.
The Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies. Ed. John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher. Ed. Robert Sheppard and Peter Robinson. Exeter, U.K.: Stride, 2000.
Devin Johnston
To get a quick sense of this range, I would suggest a few highlights from his forty-year writing career. One might begin with City (1962), a work of mixed prose and verse which investigates Birmingham as well as a phenomenology of perception, and moves between documentary and fleeting impressions. The Ship’s Orchestra (1966) is a long prose poem, and could be described as surrealist or neo-cubist in its refraction of a novelistic narrative. Fisher tricked himself out of writer’s block with The Cut Pages (1971), his most syntactically disjunctive work, an improvisation for which he used blank pages cut out of a “diary of demoralisation.” Finally, A Furnace (1986) is a forty-eight page poem which constitutes the culmination of many of Fisher’s concerns: Birmingham, industry, landscape, perception, and decay. It is a difficult and visionary work, and surely one of the most significant long-poems of its time. Such a brief synopsis of his career leaves out the shorter poems, which are often surprisingly witty and accessible when compared to the extended works; one might turn to Birmingham River (1994) for recent evidence of his lyrical appeal. Throughout his career, Fisher has had the startling ability to forge a poetics out of self-doubt and stasis, and to transform blockage into a source of invention.
The best introductory guide to Fisher’s writing is surely Interviews Through Time, and Selected Prose: Fisher is a sharp and edgy commentator on his own work, and provides enough information on each phase of his writing for patterns and strategies to emerge, with enough vacillation and deference to avoid authoritative interpretations. The volume begins with Fisher’s own “Antebiography,” a remarkably collected and candid account of his life up until 1961 - the year his first book was published. The secrecy he developed in adolescence as a defensive posture takes a prominent part in this narrative. In particular, he describes undergoing an illness at the age of twelve which allowed him to spend a few months of “happy isolation” at home:
When I emerged, I was less of a child. I hadn’t become a conventional, active adolescent; I lurked behind a vaguely juvenile manner for years. But it was as if I’d been somewhere unknown, and had come back altered. Wherever it was, it’s the location of my imagination; it’s still the place I have to find in order to write, and its essential qualities never alter. It combines a sense of lyrical remoteness with an apprehension of something turbulent, bulky, and dark. There, I don’t have to bother to grow older. (25)
Though unusually Romantic in this passage, the isolation and secrecy described run through Fisher’s poetry. Like Basil Bunting, he takes the feeling of exile to be necessary for poetic production, and suggests that it was such a feeling “which forced me to stare so hard at all the particulars of my city surroundings” (16). The alienation he explores takes the form of detailed sensory data, but often with a curious and even synesthetic disorientation. As Fisher is quick to point out, his descriptions of city life and everyday objects thus assume a political valence: “…the world is made particularly in its social manifestations, in its economics, by mental models. That’s not an unfamiliar view. And it’s probably in Blake, who’s about as near to the political position that I have as anybody” (80). The mention in this context of Blake - for whom space is both visionary and delusional - is deeply revealing. Like Blake, Fisher is concerned with the social and mental underpinnings of landscape. He is therefore understandably troubled when described as a “poet of place,” having in his poetry so often troubled our sense of what constitutes a place.
If Fisher’s phenomenology can be related to his working-class background - as he implies on several occasions in Interviews Through Time - so too can his experimentalism. His subject matter often entails the industrial city of Birmingham, for which he has been denigrated as “provincial” because concerned with a region other than “London and Oxford and Cambridge, and one or two rather well-to-do spots around that way” (39). When pressed by Eric Mottram in conversation, Fisher speaks of his emergence as a poet at a time when mainstream publishing for poetry was more readily available to those of social and educational privilege. To whatever degree such generalizations hold true, they are prevalent in Britain, and distinguish the British avant-garde as in some respects more oppositional - and directly concerned with class - than its American counterpart. Yet though he occasionally (and half-ironically) refers to his “gang” or “sort” in interviews, and recognizes some social and cultural allegiances, Fisher is more essentially a loner and an original. Much of the value of these interviews comes from witnessing the poet trying to make sense of his own unpredictable invention. Tracing the inspiration for this work, or the context for another, Fisher’s comments often feel speculative, and thus honest about the ways in which good poems get written - beyond adherence to a school or style, or even conscious intention.
For some time now Fisher’s poetry has been the subject of intelligent writing, and The Thing About Roy Fisher is no exception. The dozen essays contained in this volume build on the previous critical work of Sean O’Brien, John Matthias, Keith Tuma, and others, and exhibit considerable sophistication in doing so. Indeed, most of the essays in this anthology are revisionary, in the sense that they provide a new sense of the proper context for his work. It is Fisher’s triumph-rather than the failure of the editors and critics involved - that the resulting interpretations are often at odds (if not openly contradictory). As Robert Sheppard wisely remarks, “Critics tend to select passages consonant with their general hypotheses about the rest of Fisher’s work” (144), and Fisher offers passages to support any number of incompatible theories regarding his poetic development. In The Thing About Roy Fisher, he is by turns a Language poet, a formalist, essentially American in his influences, centrally British in his concerns, a comic poet, and an elegist.
Perhaps the most partial of these essays is Marjorie Perloff’s “Cutting-Edge Poetics: Roy Fisher’s ‘Language Book,’” which attempts to recuperate The Cut Pages for an American readership by interpreting it as an “unwitting precursor” (154) to the Language poets. Perloff’s advocacy of this book is based almost wholly on its stylistic disjunction, which she celebrates for interpretive latitude. She makes some sharp observations concerning the poem’s diction and patterning, but finds it necessary to make a comparison to one of the “Glenthorne Poems” - also published in 1971 - in order to demonstrate the superiority of Fisher’s most “cutting-edge” work. After quoting “Glenthrone no.5,” which is both complex and subtle, Perloff complains that “the poem opts for continuity, not only with respect to syntax, which is perfectly straightforward, but in its assignment of value” (166). Though there is some accuracy to her distinction, her own over-valuation of a certain range of ambiguity is tiresome, and does not make room for Fisher’s best work (in which his syntax is neither disjunctive nor conventional). Perloff’s conclusion that The Cut Pages was “quite literally, ahead of its time” (168) reveals her Language-centric (and progressivist) bent, which is not likely to garner a new readership for Fisher’s poetry. Such phrases as “ahead of its time” are, after all, generally flags of fallacious argument.
In striking contrast to her sense of context stands James Keery’s “Menacing Works in my Isolation’: Early Pieces,” in which he traces Fisher’s relationship to British poetry of the 1950s. Keery is far more circumspect and historical than Perloff, and provides some valuable research into Fisher’s early writing and its responsiveness to Apocalyptic poetry and the Movement. His parallels between Fisher and Larkin are quite compelling, and he effectively argues that both poets “undertake a programmatic disennobling of the soul of romanticism” (75). Though his position is considerably more convincing than that of Perloff, it undertakes a similar revision of what Fisher has been thought to be, and thus feels partial. That his poetry can be read in relation to both Philip Larkin and Ron Silliman indicates the breadth of his scope, but also suggests that neither context is definitive or explanatory.
The most successful essays in The Thing About Roy Fisher tend to address thematic and formal concerns rather than the thorny issue of literary context. In “Roy Fisher on Location,” James Kerrigan does an admirable job in discussing Fisher’s relation to place. He begins by describing tom Pickard’s documentary film entitled “Birmingham’s What I Think With” (1991), for which Fisher wrote a sequence of poems (which have since appeared in Birmingham River). The first of “Six Texts for a Film,” matter-of-factly subtitled “Talking to Cameras,” begins:
Birmingham’s what I think with.As Kerrigan observes, this sense of place is a far cry from the more commonplace attempt “to re-enchant home ground”: “Imagine R.S. Thomas saying that he lives in Aberdaron for want of somewhere better, or Tom Leonard confessing that he writes about Glasgow because he lacks the will to travel” (17). In distinguishing Fisher’s interest in place, Kerrigan explains that he is concerned with the semiotic experience of it through the sense, “not as neutral receptors, but as filters on what can be known, as organs which construct space” (19). By subtly introducing moments of sensory dislocation into his poems, Fisher explores the phenomenology of space - or, as Kerrigan suggests by introducing New Physics into his essay, space-time. Such an emphasis proves particularly helpful in his superb discussion of A Furnace, for the poem’s elegiac component derives from Fisher’s sense that time is more persistent than space and “doesn’t come apart from me” (42). In this manner, Fisher thinks through or wish Birmingham - to the temporal dimension of its space - rather than about it.It’s not made for that sort of job,
but it’s what they gave me.As a means of thinking, it’s a Brummagem
screwdriver. What that is,
is a medium-weight claw hammer
or something of the sort, employed
to drive a tapered woodscrew home
as if it were a nail.
It’s done
for lack of a nail, a screwdriver, a drill,
a bradawl, or the will to go looking.
Contributors to The Thing About Roy Fisher rely heavily on the interviews and prose statements collected in Interviews Through Time, and make extensive use of Fisher’s own professions of his reading habits (including references to Blake, John Cowper Powys, Wittgenstein, and A.S. Eddington). While one expects critics to track down a poet’s sources - and tell us whom Fisher reads - it is a less expected pleasure to learn who reads Fisher. News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher satisfies one’s curiosity in this respect, with tributes by a wide range of poets including Charles Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull, Peter Riley, John Matthais, Thom Gunn, August Kleinzahler, Elaine Feinstein, Carol Ann Duffy, and Maurice Scully. Though homages such as this one are generally light if pleasurable reading - and News for the Ear is no exception - it contains a few sharp and concise critical statements, such as Gael Turnbull’s comment on The Ship’s Orchestra. The volume’s chief attraction lies in Fisher’s own contributions, which include a witty memoir of his experiences as a jazz pianist as well as four relatively recent poems. The memoir, “License my Roving Hands,” traces the relation between memory and place as Fisher recalls the venues at which he played in and around Birmingham, including a regular gig which ended when the basement club was flooded. In its mnemonic approach, and his eye for detail, the memoir belongs alongside Ciaran Carson’s Last Night’s Fun and The Star Factory (which explore traditional music and memory in Belfast). His particular gift is for in-between-ness - the venue which is not quite a civic hall and not quite a dance club, or the vacillation between professional poise and amateur uncertainty and pleasure.
Of the poems, “Item” is particularly noteworthy in its consideration of the provenance of a bookend, a blunt and unremarkable object which opens a hole in time. The bookend, he tells us, was the illegitimate nightwork from the “Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company,” which otherwise specialized in “Churchill tanks” during the war. Fisher suggests that the bookend was first used for “a crimson-backed set of miniature / home encyclopedias, forced into the house // in the newspaper wars of the Thirties by the agents / of Beaverbrook, late Minister of Aircraft Production.” After introducing this historical knot, which tangles the wartime economy with individual secrecy - book-ending public history with private and covert activity - Fisher recalls us to the status of this “documentary” as poetry: the bit about the encyclopedias, he concludes, “would be artistic, ironic, and, just possibly, untrue.”
The final of the four poems is titled “Last Poems,” which makes for a wry contribution to a book of homages (though the poem was written some years before). Fisher joins the crowd of contributors with his own comment on Roy Fisher:
Thinning of the lightFrom one perspective, inasmuch as the poet described is Fisher himself, the poem constitutes a cutting self-judgment (particularly regarding the late work). Because it suggests something anemic in the poet’s concentration on fleeting impressions (in a variation on Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’s “obscure reveries,” one might imagine), the final question can be read as ironic. Yet beneath the irony Fisher recognizes his own triumph in catching “codes of what may be flaring / at the edge and beyond,” which has always been his subject. In City, Fisher wrote of Birmingham that “most of it has never been seen.” He has consistently addressed uncharted pockets of perception and experience, which are neither predetermined by the poet before the fact of the poem, nor easily defined afterwards. While part of the critic’s job is to define, the poet is only too happy to escape definition. Ed Dorn (who has had a notable impact on contemporary British poetry) has his Gunslinger say, “The mortal can be described.” Fisher’s poetry escapes easy description, definition, or summary paraphrase - which makes him a hard sell, but insures that his achievement will survive.
and the language meagre;
an impatient shift under the lines
maybe to catch the way
the lens, cold
unstable tear, flattens and tilts
to show codes of what may be flaring
at the edge and beyond.
Absence of self-pity suggests
absorption in something or other
new, never to be defined.
But in all those years before
what was his subject?