Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Thinking with Birmingham as it exists
In Roy Fisher's first sustained success, the poetry and prose sequence City, there is constant interplay between an elaborate fictiveness and a denotative realism, but whenever that realism seems the easiest course, he often opts for those techniques of defamiliarization, which I have already established as a basic strategy of the British Poetry Revival. Indeed, City, published in 1961 by Migrant Press, though considerably revised in 1963, is one of its first flowerings.
City consists of 10 poems and 16 prose passages ranging from a paragraph to a page. If Fisher had yet to perfect his means – some of the poems owe to a lush lyricism not too distant from his own early New Apocalypse poems; others stray close to Movement paradigms – he had found his obsessive material: the city of Birmingham, a theme on which he continued to play variations well into the 1990s, a non-programmatic poetry of place. A sequence from Birmingham River (1994) opens, ‘Birmingham's what I think with’.
In the late 1950s Fisher returned to the city to find that it was being redeveloped partly because of wartime bomb damage, partly for purposes of social engineering; his own childhood memories made him realize ‘how much the place was dependent upon very evanescent, temporal, subjective renderings of it, which might never be rendered’. Poems related by theme are grouped together, though not in a logical sequence. The text is actually an assemblage of varieties of writing about the city, including fragments of abandoned novels. Towards the beginning there are many prose passages describing, from a bird's eye view, the physical contours of the city and its gradual demolition. Texts which refer to the city's short century of industrial development are placed together, while passages which are autobiographical and exhibit a pessimistic sensibility are generally found in what Fisher described as ‘a sort of well-written yearning towards the end’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Poetry of SayingBritish Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000, pp. 77 - 102Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2005