Roy Fisher
His poetry shows an openness to both European and American modernist influences, whilst remaining grounded in the experience of living in the English Midlands.
Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his long career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war British poetry.
[1] He has been admired by poets and critics as diverse as Donald Davie, Eric Mottram, Marjorie Perloff, Sean O’Brien,[2] Peter Robinson, Mario Petrucci[3] and Gael Turnbull.
[4] 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.
[6] The grimy cityscape, the bomb damage of the war, and the industrial decline of the post-war years, these were all important influences on Fisher; but "something called Nature" was also present in his childhood, with excursions into the nearby countryside a regular aspect of family life.
He was particularly influenced by a group of Chicago musicians including Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, and the pianist Joe Sullivan.
After graduating and qualifying as a teacher, he taught from 1953 at the grammar school in Newton Abbot, Devon, as part of a team engaged in a radical revision of English teaching methods.
[5] 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.
After leaving Keele he continued to work as a writer and jazz musician, a second career he had sustained since the late 1950s[5] playing with a number of his childhood heroes including Bud Freeman and Wild Bill Davison when they were touring Britain.
The latter caught the eye of the poet Gael Turnbull who was putting together a British issue of the American magazine Origin, edited by Cid Corman, and he asked Fisher to contribute.
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.
That same year Fisher also published The Ships Orchestra with Fulcrum Press, a long prose sequence again showing the influence of surrealism.
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 and other Language poets a decade later.
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.
[14] ‘Wonders of Obligation’, composed 1979, marked a fresh development in Fisher's work, one that combines a greater freedom of movement through the compositional elements, and a further fluency and directness in both evocation and comment.
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.
In 1992 the poet and film maker Tom Pickard produced a documentary about Fisher with funding from the Arts Council called Birmingham’s What I Think With.
[19] 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.
Critics as diverse as Andrew Crozier, Sean O’Brien, and Marjorie Perloff have written in praise of Fisher, though from very different perspectives.
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.
