Roy Fisher (11 June 1930 – 21 March 2017) was an English poet and jazz pianist. His poetry shows an openness to both European and American

modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

influences, while remaining grounded in the experience of living in the English Midlands. Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war

British poetry {{Unreferenced, date=February 2022 British poetry is the field of British literature encompassing poetry from anywhere in the British world (whether of the British Isles, the British Empire, or the United Kingdom). The term is rarely used, as almos ...

. He has been admired by poets and critics as diverse as

Donald Davie Donald Alfred Davie, FBA (17 July 1922 – 18 September 1995) was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes. Biography Davie was born in Barnsley, ...

Eric Mottram Eric Mottram (29 December 1924 – 16 January 1995) was a British teacher, critic, editor and poet who was one of the central figures in the British Poetry Revival. Early life and education Mottram was born in London and educated at Purley Gramm ...

Marjorie Perloff Marjorie Perloff (born September 28, 1931) is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States. Early life Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exa ...

, and Sean O’Brien.

Life

Roy Fisher was born in June 1930 at 74 Kentish Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, the home into which his parents had moved in 1919 and where they lived until their deaths. His mother Emma was 39 at the time of Fisher's birth. A sister and a brother preceded him. His father Walter Fisher was a craftsman in the jewellery trade, the family ‘poor and prudent’.‘Antebiography’ in ''An Easily Bewildered Childhood: Occasional Prose 1963–2013'', Shearsman, 2013 His parents had no political or religious affiliations, but his father was a chorister at a local church. Fisher describes the landscape of his childhood as ‘ugly’, the industrial sprawl of Smethwick to the south of Handsworth a place of danger.‘Brum Born’ in ''An Easily Bewildered Childhood: Occasional Prose 1963–2013'', Shearsman, 2013. The grimy cityscape, the bomb damage of the war, and the industrial decline of the post-war years were important influences on Fisher. But ‘something called Nature’ was also present early in his life, with excursions into the nearby countryside a regular aspect of family life. Fisher went to Handsworth Grammar School. As a teenager he became interested in jazz and taught himself to play the piano. He was particularly influenced by a group of Chicago musicians including

Bud Freeman Lawrence "Bud" Freeman (April 13, 1906 – March 15, 1991) was an American jazz musician, bandleader, and composer, known mainly for playing tenor saxophone, but also the clarinet. Biography In 1922, Freeman and some friends from high sc ...

Pee Wee Russell Charles Ellsworth "Pee Wee" Russell (March 27, 1906 – February 15, 1969), was an American jazz musician. Early in his career he played clarinet and saxophones, but he eventually focused solely on clarinet. With a highly individualistic and sp ...

, and the pianist

Joe Sullivan Michael Joseph O'Sullivan (November 4, 1906 – October 13, 1971) was an American jazz pianist. Sullivan was the ninth child of Irish immigrant parents. He studied classical piano for 12 years and at age 17, he began to play popular music in si ...

. By his late teens he was playing in public with local bands. In 1948 he went to

Birmingham University , mottoeng = Through efforts to heights , established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...

to read English. After graduating and qualifying as a teacher, he taught from 1953 at the grammar school in Newton Abbott, Devon, as part of a team engaged in a radical revision of English teaching methods. In the same year Fisher married artist Barbara Venables; they were to have two children. His son Ben was Head of French at University of Bangor, and creator of one of the world's most popular narrow-gauge railway websites; his daughter Sukey is a screenwriter. Returning to Birmingham in 1957, where he again worked as a jazz musician and began encountering, often late at night, the material that would prompt new poetry and prose, Fisher worked as a specialist Drama teacher in a primary school, moving to Dudley College of Education in 1958. In 1963 he was appointed to Bordesley College of Education in Birmingham as Principal Lecturer and Head of Department of English and Drama. In 1971 Fisher moved to

Keele University Keele University, officially known as the University of Keele, is a public research university in Keele, approximately from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England. Founded in 1949 as the University College of North Staffordshire, Keele ...

where he taught in the Department of American Studies until 1982. After leaving Keele he continued to work as a writer and jazz musician, a second career he had sustained since the late 1950s playing with a number of his childhood heroes including Bud Freeman and

Wild Bill Davison William Edward Davison (January 5, 1906 – November 14, 1989), nicknamed "Wild Bill", was an American jazz cornetist. He emerged in the 1920s through his work playing alongside Muggsy Spanier and Frank Teschemacher in a cover band where they ...

when they were touring Britain.Interview with Eric Mottram 1973, excerpted in ''Interviews Through Time''. Shearsman, revised edition, 2013. Fisher moved to Upper Hulme, Staffordshire Moorlands in 1982, and to Earl Sterndale in Derbyshire in 1986. In 1985 he was divorced from Barbara Venables Fisher, who died in 2007. In 1987 he married the playwright Joyce Holliday and outlived her by fifteen years. He died at home on 21 March 2017, aged 86.

Work

Early work

In 1954 Fisher had two short poems broadcast on the BBC by

Charles Causley Charles Stanley Causley CBE FRSL (24 August 1917 – 4 November 2003) was a British poet, school teacher and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, espec ...

, and another published in a small press magazine ''The Window.'' The latter caught the eye of the poet

Gael Turnbull Gael Turnbull (7 April 1928 – 2 July 2004) was a Scottish poet who was an important figure in the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s. Biography Turnbull was born in Edinburgh and grew up in Northern England and in Canada, where he ...

who was putting together a British issue of the American magazine ''Origin'', edited by Cid Corman, and he asked Fisher to contribute.Interview with John Tranter published by ''Jacket'' magazine 1989, excerpted in ''Interviews Through Time''. Fisher and Turnbull became friends, and remained close until Turnbull's death in 2004. Turnbull introduced Fisher to the work of American modernist poets including

William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pedia ...

Robert Creeley Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Char ...

Charles Olson Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modern American poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York ...

, and Louis Zukovsky, as well as to

Basil Bunting Basil Cheesman Bunting (1 March 1900 – 17 April 1985) was a British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of '' Briggflatts'' in 1966, generally regarded as one of the major achievements of the modernist traditio ...

, whom he met through Turnbull. Cid Corman also provided poetry tutorials by post. In these writers Fisher encountered an aesthetic that was serious and demanding. It was this rather than any stylistic mannerism he took from them. Publication of Fisher's work during his first ten years as a poet owed a great deal to Turnbull. Fisher's first pamphlet ''City'' (1961) was published by Turnbull's Migrant Press. The assemblage of verse and prose which makes up the text, was compiled from Fisher's notebooks by Michael Shayer, Turnbull's partner at Migrant. Fisher was dissatisfied with the pamphlet but it ‘caught people’s attention.’ A second pamphlet, ''Ten Interiors with Various Figures,'' was published by Tarasque Press in 1966, a surreal sequence of narrative poems some with quite short lines but many using a very long line close to prose. That same year Fisher also published ''The Ships Orchestra'' with

Fulcrum Press Fulcrum Press (1965 – 1974)
quoting Rathna Ramanathan, "English little presses, book desig ...

, a long prose sequence again showing the influence of surrealism. The initial idea for the work came from Picasso's ‘ Three Musicians’. Fisher wrote this work sequentially, each new section generated out of the preceding material. The work grows organically, following no plot, and avoiding any sense of dramatic development. The writing is often very funny and can be viewed as a verbal equivalent of the

cubist Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...

technique Picasso employs in the painting. After these publications Fisher reached an impasse and, apart from fulfilling a commission to make performance-translations of three Schubert song-cycles, wrote nothing for 5 years.Interview with Robert Sheppard, 1982, excerpted in ''Interviews Through Time''. In 1968 when Fulcrum published ''Collected Poems,'' bringing together all of the work Fisher wished to preserve, the poet thought he would not write again.

The 1970s

Fisher emerged from this period of blocked creativity in 1971, composing a number of prose pieces and sequences of poems. ‘The Cut Pages’ is the most radical of these 1970s works and remains Fisher's most challenging. The late sixties had been personally difficult years and Fisher kept a journal in which he recorded the ‘grisly’ details of his life. ‘The Cut Pages’ Fisher describes as an ‘exercise in self-permission’. He cut the blank pages from his notebook with a razor and started to write on them the ‘converse’ of what was in the journal – things ‘there was no constraint upon’. He continued writing until he had used up all the pages. The American critic Marjorie Perloff describes the poem as having affinities with Samuel Beckett and as an ‘unwitting precursor’ of the experiments of

Ron Silliman Ron Silliman (born August 5, 1946) is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wr ...

and other

Language poets The Language poets (or ''L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scal ...

a decade later. ‘The Cut Pages’ became the title sequence for a 1971 publication from Fulcrum that also contained a four further prose pieces. ''Matrix'' was also published in 1971 by Fulcrum. The title sequence, ‘Matrix’, like a number of Fisher's poems, draws upon painting, in this case Böcklin's series of pictures called ‘ The Isle of the Dead’ and Monet's late paintings of waterlilies. This volume also includes ‘Glenthorne Poems’, ‘The Six Deliberate Acts,’ and a number of collaborations with visual artists. Two of his works, ‘Correspondence’ and ‘Metamorphoses’, were illustrated by Tom Phillips and published in 1970 by Tetrad, a small London press run by artist Ian Tyson. ‘Also’ a collaboration with artist Derrick Greaves was published by Tetrad in 1972, and the same year the artist Ronald King published ''Bluebeard’s Castle'' with text by Fisher. Other collaborations with King followed over a period of twenty-five years, mostly appearing as Artist's Books and all issued by his Circle Press. Fisher produced work steadily during the 1970s and published a further volume in 1978, ''The Thing About Joe Sullivan'', this time with

Carcanet Carcanet Press is a publisher, primarily of poetry, based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1969 by Michael Schmidt. In 2000 it was named the '' Sunday Times'' millennium Small Publisher of the Year. History ''Carcanet'' was originally a li ...

. It was a Poetry Book Society Choice. The volume includes ‘Handsworth Liberties’, a sequence of sixteen poems written between 1974 and 1977. These poems recall images of the neighbourhood where he grew up. Fisher described the writing of these pieces as an attempt to ‘repel the invasion of landscape’ associated with childhood memories. ‘Wonders of Obligation’, composed in 1979, marks a new development in Fisher's work, which combines a greater freedom of movement through the compositional elements, and a further fluency and directness in both evocation and comment.

''A Furnace''

In 1980

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

published ''Poems 1955–1980,'' affording Fisher's work a level of recognition it had not previously enjoyed. Six years later OUP published ''A Furnace'', an ambitious book-length poem structured around the idea of a double spiral with a central section, ‘Core’, flanked by sections where passages move ‘in’ or ‘out’ from the core. An ‘Introit’ provides the background and context to the work.'They are all gone into the world,' a conversation with Peter Robinson published in ''Interviews Through Time''. As with Fisher's other work, it is a collage of images, but here drawn from a wide range of places and historical periods. In 1980 Fisher travelled outside of Britain for the first time and ''A Furnace'' includes references to a prehistoric burial site in Brittany, to Paris, Trier, Chicago and to Ampurias in Spain. Bunting's ''Briggflatts'' is in some senses a model, though Fisher allows himself more space and the language is less compacted than in Bunting. A further collection, ''Poems 1955–1987'', was published by OUP in 1988, mainly collecting previous published work.

Later poems

In 1992 the poet and film maker

Tom Pickard Tom Pickard (born 1946, Newcastle upon Tyne, England) is a poet, and documentary film maker who was an important initiator of the movement known as the British Poetry Revival. Biography Pickard grew up in the working-class suburbs of Cowgate, Ne ...

produced a documentary about Fisher with funding from the Arts Council called ''Birmingham’s What I Think With''. Fisher wrote a sequence of poems for the film describing the city of his birth. These were published by OUP in 1994 along with other new work in a collection titled ''Birmingham River''. The collaboration with Ronald King continued with ''Top Down Bottom Up'' published in 1989, and ''Anansi Company'' appearing in 1991. A pamphlet, ''It Follows That'', issued by Pig Press, also appeared in 1994. In 1996 Bloodaxe published ''Dow Low Drop: New and Selected Poems.'' Dow Low is a quarried-out hillside near Fisher's home in Derbyshire. ‘Dow Low Drop’, and the poem ‘It Follows That’ republished here, both include sections of prose, a form Fisher had not used since the 1960s. In an interview with Peter Robinson given in 1998 Fisher questions the idea that his work has gone through distinct periods of development, and the collected poems ''The Long and the Short of It'', published by Bloodaxe in 2005, does not present the poems in a chronological sequence. In a note at the end of the book Fisher says: ‘my habits of working on projects from time to time over long periods and my heterodox approach to the methods I use would make an arrangement that seemed chronological false: so nothing of the kind is here attempted.’ A later collection, ''Standard Midland'', was published in 2010 by Bloodaxe, and shortlisted that year for the Costa Poetry Award. The poems were incorporated into a revised edition of ''The Long and the Short of It'' (2012). ''Standard Midland'' includes poems in various styles from lighter pieces, to more characteristic work, including two enigmatic prose poems, and another of his collaborative pieces with Ronald King. A further volume, ''Slakki: New & Neglected Poems'', was published by Bloodaxe in October 2016.

Critical reception

As early as 1962,

Denise Levertov Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Ess ...

–in an article published in ''Kultur''–singled Fisher out as one of the most promising young poets in Britain. His early poems appeared in several influential anthologies:

Michael Horovitz Michael Yechiel Ha-Levi Horovitz (4 April 1935 – 7 July 2021) was a German-born British poet, editor, visual artist and translator who was a leading part of the Beat Poetry scene in the UK. In 1959, while still a student, he founded the "tr ...

’s '' Children of Albion'' (1969), Edward Lucie-Smith’s ''British Poetry Since 1945'' (1971) and Jon Silkin’s ''Poetry of the Committed Individual'' (1973) – all published by Penguin. Fisher attracted the attention of a diverse range of critics and reviewers over the years. Eric Mottram, writing in ''Stand'' (1969–70) praised Fisher as an experimental modernist, while Donald Davie, in a chapter devoted to Fisher in ''Thomas Hardy and British Poetry'' (1973), claimed affinities with what he considered a native tradition.Donald Davie, ''Thomas Hardy and British Poetry'', Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1973. Peter Robinson has suggested that this kind of ‘dualism of approach’, with modernists and traditionalists both claiming Fisher as one of their own, has continued to the present.Peter Robinson, ‘Introduction’ in ''The Thing About Roy Fisher'', ed. John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson, Liverpool University Press, 2000. Fisher himself never sought to associate with any particular camp or school, and his writing during all periods of his career embraces a range of styles. Critics as diverse as Andrew Crozier, Sean O’Brien, and Marjorie Perloff have written in praise of Fisher, though from very different perspectives. Despite the quality of his work, Fisher never enjoyed the level of celebrity accorded to some of his contemporaries. Davie says that Fisher was a victim of "the blindness and condescension of the metropolis to writing which is provincial in its origins or its subject matter". In interviews, Fisher described himself as being highly conscious of his provincial and class background. At the same time, Fisher never sought celebrity, being largely indifferent to the world of poetry prizes and media hype. While admired by many poets and dedicated poetry readers he remains largely unknown to a wider reading public. ''News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher'' edited by Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard appeared in 2000, as a tribute to the poet on his seventieth birthday. A volume of critical essays, ''The Thing About Roy Fisher'', edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson, was published the same year. A compendium of interviews with Fisher, ''Interviews Through Time'', edited by Tony Fraser, also appeared in 2000, with an updated version issued in 2013. In 2010, ''An Unofficial Roy Fisher'' edited by Peter Robinson was published in celebration of the poet's eightieth birthday. This book includes work by Fisher not collected elsewhere, as well as tributes from other poets and commentary on his work. The work also includes an update to the invaluable bibliography published in ''The Thing About Roy Fisher,'' compiled by Derek Slade. In 2003, Fisher was made lifetime Honorary Poet of the City of Birmingham. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2005.

Bibliography

*''City'' (Migrant Press, 1961) *''Ten Interiors with Various Figures'' (Tarasque Press, 1966) *''The Memorial Fountain'' (Northern House, 1966) *''The Ship’s Orchestra'' (Fulcrum Press, 1966) *''Collected Poems'' (Fulcrum Press, 1968) *''Matrix'' (Fulcrum Press, 1971) *''Three Early Pieces'' (Trans Gravity Advertiser, Publication 3, 1971) *''The Cut Pages'' (Fulcrum Press, 1971; Shearsman, 1986) *''Nineteen Poems and an Interview'' (Grossteste Press, 1975; 1977) *''The Thing About Joe Sullivan: Poems 1971–1977'' ( Carcanet Press, 1978) *''Poems 1955–1980'' (Oxford University Press, 1980) *''Talks For Words'' (Blackweir Press, 1980) *''A Furnace'' (Oxford University Press, 1986) *''Poems 1955–1987'' (Oxford University Press, 1988) *''Birmingham River'' (Oxford University Press, 1994) *''It Follows'' That (Pig Press, 1994) *''The Dow Low Drop: New & Selected Poems'' ( Bloodaxe Books, 1996) *''The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005'' ( Bloodaxe Books, 2005) *''Standard Midland'' ( Bloodaxe Books, 2010) *''Selected Poems'' ed. August Kleinzahler ( Flood Editions, US, 2010) *''The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2010'' ( Bloodaxe Books, 2012) *''An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963–2013,'' ed. Peter Robinson (Shearsman, 2014) *''Slakki: New & Neglected Poems'', ed. Peter Robinson ( Bloodaxe Books, 2016) *''A Furnace'', ed. Peter Robinson ( Flood Editions, US, 2018) *''The Citizen and the making of City'', ed. Peter Robinson ( Bloodaxe Books, 2022)

References

External links

Roy Fisher at West Midlands Literary Heritage
with John Tranter. Jacket 1, December 2001.
Some Aspects of the Poetry of Roy Fisher by J. D. Needham ,1975
*William Wotton
"The Measure of the Muse" (review of the ''Long and the Short of It'')
''The Guardian'', 29 October 2005.

*Peter Robinson
"Keeping it Strange" (review of ''The Long and the Short of It'')
''Notre Dame Review'', Summer 2006, Issue 22, p. 208. *Roy Fisher reading http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/fisherroy/1978 *http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/roy-fisher *http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/roy-fisher *Fisher reading 'Inner Voice' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxaEbvyMye0 and 'The Poetry Promise' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc1svrbcC8Y&ebc=ANyPxKpWYXG94s_WTp3MrJ2dE-ff8QJdV1pb87UKXoyAyPJLiecF1PNkG9nIdxeMeLM2RTx-YB5JNo_ygtRu4t7hoIMDqlXcAg *''Roy Fisher: The Long and the Short of It:'' Roy Fisher filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce reading a selection of his poems at his home in Earl Sterndale in 2008. https://vimeo.com/192330802 *Michael Caines
Roy Fisher Obituary
''The Guardian'', 6 April 2017
Roy Fisher, poet and jazz pianist – obituary
''The Telegraph'', 22 March 2017 *Fleur Adcock
DNB Entry for Roy Fisher
''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', January 2021 {{DEFAULTSORT:Fisher, Roy 1930 births 2017 deaths Academics of Keele University Alumni of the University of Birmingham British male poets British Poetry Revival British poets Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature 21st-century British male writers People from Handsworth, West Midlands