The first poem
opens with a first person subject position that it is consonant with the figure
of Allen Fisher, who took up post as head of contemporary arts at the Crewe
branch of Manchester
Metropolitan University
in 2005.[4] At
first, the new post, a new start, if we take the lines autobiographically,
sounds as though it were less than congenial; ‘I’ appears four times in 17
lines.
When
I first came to Crewe
I
saw the death of my mind
and
started work again
to
bring it back to life (Fisher 2010: 4)
‘I’ is witness to this mental demise.
The inability to think the aesthetic creatively or the analytical
constructively seems to have been quite precisely a pre-vision or a
presentiment produced by ‘first coming’ to Crewe,
on first arrival. The word ‘saw’ offers a sinister image of a threatening
situation, of seeing the death of
mind. To the extent that these bold lines recognise the demand for action they
are positive: ‘I … started work again/ to bring [my mind] back to life.’ Work
(and this poem addresses employment obliquely) is required to reanimate the
mind. The lineation and phrasing run parallel to emphasise the opening point as
axiomatic.
Crewe, a famous railway junction, is a place to change
trains or to rush through, though the narrator ‘comes’ there (the poem points
to ‘platform 5’). Re-commencement of work can begin immediately and in situ,
though the poem seems specifically non-specific about how to ‘bring’ the mind
‘back to life’:
through
nourishment unknown
to me until then
The nurturing of mind is to be
effected by means or agents hitherto unknown, but
with
vegetables
and fruit already
known,
that is, through a diet whose
elements, since they are common generically identified vegetarian ingredients,
were known previously (though perhaps innocently of their revivifying
properties). The poem suggests that good diet is the key to good mental health,
though this is not an epistemological journey from not-knowing to knowing; on
the contrary, the unknown is evoked from the known:
with tactics
already tried and
sometimes
previously
tested
The answer was already there, the
knowledge simply not acknowledged.
The ‘tried and tested’, to bring out the cliché dispersed across two lines,
still has not produced knowledge exactly, but a partially unknowing ‘nourishment’
of mind. But there is resolution (of sorts) at hand. Although the syntax is
repetitive (‘until then’ ‘until/on the third day’), some word clusters in
isolation sound like discontinuous phrases lifted from other syntactic
constructions (suggesting collagic splicing) the moment of cure is articulated
clearly enough, so long as we syntactically break at the end of line 14:
until
on
the third day after
the
railway declined
I
stood on the grime of
platform
5 and revived
The railway ‘declining’ does not
sound like a process that has happened in three days; it comes from the
vocabulary of long, slow, historical progress, from a narrative of
post-industrial decline, for example. The change in lexis suggests the kind of collage
I call creative linkage, where the abrupt changes are so melded into the
texture of the poem that is hard to disentangle them so that various kinds of
simulated narratives can be conjured into being. The tone also suggests that
this sweeping sentence over 17 lines (all of which I have quoted here) is
drawing towards a conclusion. The internal rhyme of ‘5’ and ‘revived’, and
‘revived’’s faint echo of ‘declined’ (their shared ‘i’ sounds and ‘ed’
endings), which itself picks up the ‘l’ and ‘d’ sounds scattered among
preceding words, helps to create that conclusive feel. The loco-specific detail
(Crewe station platform 5) seems an odd
location for a feeling of revived mind, but that is what on offer, with the
affirmation of the state of belonging and the act of ‘coming’. ‘Coming’ and
‘going’, a little like ‘knowing’ and ‘unknowing’, are party to dynamic
couplings in this poem. The ‘grime’ of the station adds a certain historical
piquancy, a touch of pre-decline years or just the vocabulary from the age of steam
(which, as we shall see, is really the age of fire). For all this, the
operative word, is the verb ‘revived’, which of course is a synonym for ‘to bring
it back to life’, but it is the semantic pivot of the poem since
it is also part of the poem’s literal conclusion, its actual last lines, its
textual closure, in another syntactic chain, the force of which my truncated
quotation has muted. Thus we read a phrase beginning with ‘revived’ as much as we
can read one ending in it: ‘I’
revived
my
confidence in
a
lack I now recognised
as
necessary as demanding
This recognition happens not
‘then’, like the first attempts at nourishment, but ‘now’ (though perhaps it is
only three days later), and involves ‘my confidence in/ a lack’, which implies
an acceptance of what is ‘unknown/ to me’, almost a belief in negative capability,
that state Keats recognised in which the (fully-alive) mind – Keats was
comparing himself to the analytic machinery of Coleridge’s brain – ‘is capable
of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason’. (Sp V: 14 better ref) But the further recognition on
the part of the poem’s narrator is that ‘lack’ is necessary (a Fisher positive since the valorising of the term in Necessary Business); but it is also ‘demanding’,
a word that suggests both its weak case meaning as being difficult but also in
its strong case meaning as being that which issues a challenge, stimulates
response. Only a mind fully alive to the world may respond to such a demand.
The urgency of the discovery is emphasised by the rhetorical equivalence of ‘as
… as’ of the final line, although the line can also be paraphrased more
dependently: that confidence in lack is as
necessary as the act of making
demands. In ‘Proposal 1’, Fisher is precisely proposing (the dictionary tells
us that to propose also means ‘to suggest or lay before one as something to be
done: to purpose or intend: to move formally’) ‘confidence in/ a lack’ as a
cure to ‘the death of my mind’.
There is an
obvious contradiction in my reading. It offers (quite faithfully) two answers
to the predicament of the death of mind: one is somatic (and requires a change
in diet); the other is mental and offers a contrary ‘confidence in/ a lack’.
(It would make no sense to say one could have a confidence in a lack of
potassium in the same way that Keatsian negative capability is entertained.
Lacking in confidence is cured by confidence in lack.) The two answers are, of
course, separated temporally; the somatic solution is ‘then’; the mental solution
is ‘now’. However, the disjointed form of the poem, or its creative linkage,
formally celebrates a lack of cohesion in which one might have some confidence,
as ever in the work of Allen Fisher which is so often appropriative and
collagist in temper (and often much more wildly so than here). One function of
the ‘Resources’ list in a Fisher volume is to acknowledge the provenance of
quotations, but it also serves to destablise
the text which is often proved to be completely appropriated and
collaged (or almost completely so, which makes the ‘original’ contributions
oddly destabilising in return).
Along with
contemporary philosophy (citations to Badiou, Foucault, Williams), in Proposals’ ‘Resources’ there appears
Diane K. Drummond’s Crewe: Railway Town, Company and People. 1840-1914. Here
perhaps is the source of the lexis of decline, analysed above. Since it is the
only book on Crewe on the list, is it the source of the seemingly
autobiographical ‘When I first came to Crewe’
or the situational ‘I stood on the grime of/ platform 5’? They are crucial
first person statements for the textual cohesion of the poem, and it is
conventional to treat them as autobiographical; indeed they are, formally
speaking, but the ‘I’ might not be that of Allen Fisher who I so easily
identified with this platform arrivant at Crewe.
‘Confidence in/ a lack’ in the poem’s formulation –
particularised and emphasised by the enjambement – becomes (as is appropriate
to poetics as a speculative discourse) the more general ‘confidence in lack’
that I have already identified with Keats’ negative capability. ‘Confidence in
Lack’, Fisher’s poetics paper delivered at the Poetry and Public Language conference in Plymouth in 2007, is quite
explicit about the relevance of the phrase to his practice: ‘confidence in
lack’, the condition of all ‘good poetry’ so far as Fisher is concerned, is
defined as ‘a confidence that poetry, when it is at its most efficacious,
cannot propose logic … and cannot aspire to coherence’. (Fisher 2007: 77) [5] Much of the essay provides examples from
modern science, such as the theory of ‘decoherence’ with which quantum physics
is able to negotiate its ‘absurd’ results (Fisher 2007: 83), or from
philosophy, such as Plato’s banishment of the ‘inspired’ poets. Plato’s rejections
of poets’ confidence in lack focuses on his disquiet at their inability to
paraphrase their poetry (though Fisher does not use that term). As a
‘corrective’, Plato proposes logic, which, to come back to Fisher’s
contentions, is what poetry cannot propose. ‘Poetry needs to make these proposals’,
Fisher says, referring to the non-logical constructions of knowledge that the
essay enumerates example by example, discipline by discipline. (Fisher 2007: 77)
The use of the very word ‘proposal’ links the poetics to the poems Proposals, and it is noticeable that the
‘resources’ of the poems and the ‘works cited’ of the poetics are remarkably
consonant, suggesting that similar bodies of knowledge are ultilised quite
differently (but with crossovers and cross-references) in poetry and poetics.
Fisher’s remark suggests that poetry should also propose these ‘lacking’ models,
though by definition it could not use logic and coherence as its vehicle (as
the poetics can, despite the occasional teasing game). ‘Confidence in lack’
comes to stand for both an attitude towards content (the proposals) and towards
form, in the fractured discourse of creative linkage.
Content and
form, poetry and poetics, in their different ways, are resolved, but not closed
down, by the lack of confidence in logic and coherence, and by their almost resistance to those forces. As
Fisher himself puts it in the poetics: ‘The ideas of coherence and endings – or
plot knowing – as substance for aesthetic choice are anathema to intelligent
feeling and all engender a lack of confidence.’ (Fisher 2007: 81) But here the
poem may be seen flirting with the readers’ propensity to logic and coherence,
in the same way that – in a different context – Ron Silliman’s theory of the New
Sentence utilises the ‘parsimony principle’, the fact that the readers’ minds
make or take the shortest distance between otherwise discontinuous sentences.
(no ref) You can present it as confidence in the productive energies of
readers, in readerly participation in textual realisation, as Fisher does in
‘Necessary Business’, but more negatively, it is almost as though a writer’s
negative capability is predicated on a reader’s confidence in textual
plenitude, his or her will to coherence, his or her addiction to logic. [6]
This is an ironic vote of no confidence in the reader that is at the same time
an acknowledgement that Fisher has confidence in their lack to form the poem
with recourse to the very energies that are ‘anathema’ to poesis. But the work
formed is more complex than its text.
The 2010 Proposals is a beautifully designed book, published by
Fisher’s own Spanner press as a full-colour A4 text printed on high quality
paper (though it has no spine and is stapled), with some help from Glenn
Storhaug, a fellow-Hereford publisher and proprietor of the enterprising Five
Seasons Press. Like Griffiths
with his less sophisticated printing methods, Fisher had control over the
book’s appearance. Each open folio contains a poem on the left page, and an
image (or two images, depending on interpretation) on the right. Beneath the
image is a prose passage, the ‘commentary’. While ‘poem’ and ‘image’ are
primary, ‘commentary’ is of necessity a secondary concept, though it isn’t
clear whether these comment upon text, image, both, or the combination of the
two arrayed above it. As such it is a modern emblem book. Perhaps the best
known of the original works in English is Francis Quarles’ Emblems (1635), although the book itself borrows from a longer
continental history.
Like Fisher’s work, in each section of the book, multiple
texts accompany a single illustration: a Biblical quotation (‘Even in laughter
the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness’, for example)
would be followed by a lyrical or narrative poem exemplifying the moral import
of the quotation, and these are reinforced by further quotation (in some
European emblem books this is explicitly called the ‘commentary’, as in
Fisher’s work) and usually drawn from one or several of the Christian Fathers,
notably St Augustine (‘Sweetness in temporal matters is deceitful’, for
example) and is rounded off with a four line epigram (often addressed to Cupid,
in Quarles’ texts):
What,
Cupid, are thy shafts already made?
And seeking honey to set up thy trade,
True emblem of thy sweets! thy bees do bring
Honey in their mouths, but in their tails a sting. [7]
The illustrations represent symbols
that are presented in the text; in this example, it images forth the ‘emblem’
of the bees with their dual honey and sting (which underlines the
interdependence of laughter and sorrow in the opening Biblical quotation). Here
the images and texts exist in a mutually self-confirming, but not necessarily
simple, relationship to goad the reader into a contemplation of these moral
forces in his or her life. In this last aspect we can see a distant but potent
connection to the earlier tradition in Fisher’s work by examining first commentary,
then image (or emblem), that accompanies poem 1, examined above. The commentary
runs:
The first
fustian and velvet cutting shop was established in Crewe produced railway
uniforms, 650 people, mostly women, with a need to change trains at a Grand Junction and in
comfortable imitation of Crewe Hall. (5)
We can sense the elisions, an ‘and’
between ‘established in Crewe’ and ‘produced railway uniforms, or ‘employing’
perhaps between ‘produced railway uniforms’ and ‘650 people’, and so on, and it
is difficult to absolutely resolve in terms of coherent reading, although it
feels like a cut up or fold in, a damaged recitation of an account of the
industries of Crewe that surrounded the station, the gendered divisions of
patterns of employment, and the design and disposition of the original station.
Drummond’s Crewe: Railway Town, Company and People is the source, an external authority as in the emblem tradition, though the original passage is heavily de-formed, (and lightly edited). The chapter ‘Growth and Emerging Social Structure’ contains all the words above, in the same order, but distributed across two paragraphs, one describing female labor in Crewe, and the next outlining the importance of Crewe railway station as a transportation hub in the past, and its notable architecture;
Drummond’s Crewe: Railway Town, Company and People is the source, an external authority as in the emblem tradition, though the original passage is heavily de-formed, (and lightly edited). The chapter ‘Growth and Emerging Social Structure’ contains all the words above, in the same order, but distributed across two paragraphs, one describing female labor in Crewe, and the next outlining the importance of Crewe railway station as a transportation hub in the past, and its notable architecture;
Of the women who did work in Crewe, the vast majority, 38.2 per cent, were employed as milliners and dressmakers. Most probably, they worked in the town’s various clothing factories and fustian workshops. The first fustian and velvet cutting shop was established in Crewe in 1869, while a few years earlier a clothing factory, Compton’s, had been inaugurated with railway company aid, producing railway uniforms. By 1900, Crewe had two fustian mills and three clothing factories, employing a total of 650 people, mostly women. The most famous of all these was Ada Nield Chew, the ‘Crewe Factory Girl’, whose revelation of the ‘…lingering, dying wage…’ paid a Compton’s factory shocked Crewe in May 1894 (Chew, 1982, p. 76 and Crewe Chronicle, 5 May 1894).
Crewe was perhaps most famous for its railway station. Few travelled north on the British railway system without needing to change trains at the Grand Junction. Crewe’s Old English-style station, with its carved oak beams and figures, according to John Ruskin, in imitation of the nearby Jacobean Crewe Hall, was commented on by many contemporaries. (Drummond 1995: 28; lifted phrases underlined)
All 35 commentaries look as though they are collaged fragments from a source text; if they comment on the poems, they do so by inference.
Formal
complexity is heightened by the images. ‘Elements of images from Proposals,’ a note tells us, first
appeared in 1991, that is from the early years of Gravity, though the word ‘elements’ suggests that the images have
been transformed since then. (Fisher 2010: 74) Most of the images are mirrored
diptyches, with the left-hand image often containing a depiction of fire, the
basic physical energy that built and powered early trains (and fuelled the
Industrial Revolution more generally): furnaces, molten metals, lightning,
various forest and bush fires, though we also find powders of oxide, a ‘blazing
tracer bullet’ and (an effect not of fire but of heat), a shattering wine
glass. (Fisher 2010: 49) A handwritten reference to Prometheus accompanies one.
They are often collaged or treated photographs, perhaps images drawn from
magazines. The right-hand images mirror these in non-programmatic ways, but is
usually an abstraction of the left-hand image; for example, a flare at the top
of an oil well is matched by a triangle with a rough circle at its apex.
Occasionally this pattern is disrupted. Clearly the images form a sequence in
their own right and indeed seem to refer more to the formal arrangements of
each other than to the content or form of the poems (or commentaries).
However,
following my focus on the first poem and commentary of Proposals, I want to dwell upon the first paired image that
accompanies it. The left-hand image, framed within
the overall grey-green smudges of the right-hand side, shows the explosive
climax of a firework display: plumes and fans of silver and red spray out into
the air (and are reflected in what might be a river). But there are dark
patches like shadows that evoke a sinister aspect: the black band at the bottom
might be a crowd, their backs to us, but in the background (perhaps against a
brown hillside, possibly a water colour wash over pictorial elements) is a
silhouette that could be a machine: a square with a pipe or chimney rising from
it. Perhaps two (or more) images have been overlaid. The right-hand image seems
simplified. Against the grey wash stands the drawn (and water-coloured?) image
of a bone, or antler, or tree-branch. It vaguely mirrors the shape of the
firework burst, and is more oblique in left-right mirroring than many of the subsequent
images, as though to tease us with its mismatch from the outset. Fisher’s first
poem seeks to question the nature of work and well-being while the images
present mirrored ‘emblems’ of the energy that the capitalist world of
employment is dependent upon, and of which the ‘commentary’ supplies a
fractured historical account. ‘Crewe’, as the
subject of the first part of the the work, is formed thrice as: present account
poem; historical and cultural commentary; and loosely allegorical emblem. It is
the very looseness that animates a reader’s productive energies.
At the level of
formal abstraction (rather than at this level of content, which oddly fits more
perfectly than we would expect in a Fisher project) we can equate
text-image-commentary in Proposals
more satisfactorily. In fact, one could say that all three elements
destabilise, rather than reinforce, one another. If ‘interruption is one of the
fundamental devices’ – and they are formal
devices – ‘of all structuring’, as Benjamin says, then these elements –
verbal and visual – present the formal interruption that Fisher calls
‘imperfect fit’. Even in the first section, while motifs cohere around concepts
of work and employment (contemporary and historical), formally prose, poetry
and image pull apart, as the ‘commentary’ fails to ‘comment’, the images ‘fail’
to illustrate. As ever in Fisher’s work, the formal elements belong and do not
belong. [8] Creative
linkage conjoins and disjoins. Despite Fisher’s anathema towards logic and
coherence, in the apprehension of the work as form these forces are engaged by
the very resistances to logic and coherence by imperfect fit, by a multifarious
confidence in lack. In apprehending Proposals,
the viewer and reader are one and the same and the formal complexity that
results from imperfect fit from reading and viewing requires the same energies
– the positive capability – of a will towards coherence and logic that I evoked
earlier, one that is simultaneously and formally undermined by the work. In
order to read the text (and images) at all, we need to use the very
capabilities that are undermined in, and by, the text itself, in disharmonious
imperfect collusion with the images.
Barry, Peter. ‘Allen Fisher and “content-specific” poetry’, in
Hampson, R. and Barry, Peter, eds. The New British Poetries: The Scope of
the Possible. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1993.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London:
Fontana, 1970.
Drummond, Diane K. Crewe: Railway Town, Company and People: 1840-1914. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.
Drummond, Diane K. Crewe: Railway Town, Company and People: 1840-1914. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.
Fisher, Allen. Unpolished
Mirrors Serial H. London: Spanner, 1980.
Fisher, Allen. Necessary
Business. London:
Spanner, 1985.
Fisher, Allen. Gravity. Cambridge:
Salt, 2004a.
Fisher, Allen. Entanglement. Toronto:
The Gig, 2004b.
Fisher, Allen. Place. Hastings:
Reality Street,
2005.
Fisher, Allen. Leans. Cambridge:
Salt, 2007.
Fisher, Allen. Proposals 16-25: 10 Pages from a Sequence of Emblems. Norfolk: Oystercatcher,
2009.
Fisher, Allen. Proposals. Hereford:
Spanner, 2010.
Fisher, Allen. ‘Confidence in
Lack’, in Lopez, Tony, and Caleshu, Anthony, Poetry and Public Language. Exeter:
Shearsman, 2007: 77-86.
Fisher, Allen: http://allenfisher1.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/allen-fisher-traps-or-tools-damage.pdf
(accessed 12 October 2012)
Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. Poetic Artifice. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978.
Quarles, Francis, Emblems (1635) at http://archive.org/stream/quarlesemblems00quar#page/n9/mode/2up
(accessed 14 October 2013)
See all the links to my work in progress The Meaning of Form (of which this is a part) here.
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
You can read about my own recent poetry here and here, and follow the links to points of online purchase.
[1] My episode ‘Allen Fisher’s Apocalypse Then: Between Place and Gravity: Technique and Technology’ in When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (Exeter: Shearsman 2011) outlines differences
between the two projects in more detail. As Fisher says: ‘The compositional
procedures used in PLACE were radically reappraised for the Gravity work,
taking into account the critique of the classical and ideal models of
preparation and existence. The overall plan, conceived as the loci of a point
on a moving sphere, in PLACE, was replaced in Gravity with the
looser diagram of a cylinder marked off in Fibonacci ratios and then crushed,
thus leading to a new set, but of damaged proportions.’ http://allenfisher1.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/allen-fisher-traps-or-tools-damage.pdf
(accessed 12 October 2012)
[2] The 750
pages of Gravity as a Consequence of
Shape similarly appeared in fasicles, pamphlets and books but were
collected in book-form and then in Gravity, 281 pages (2004), Entanglement,
287 pages (2004) and Leans, 183 pages (2007).
[3] Fisher makes reference here to Mukarovsky’s aesthetic
function in this piece, about which I write in detail in Chapter 8, ‘Creative
Linkage’ in my The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2005): 198-9. The aesthetic function is an openly
formal entity: ‘Because it lacks unequivocal “content”, its aesthetic function
becomes transparent and acts with the other functions.’ (Fisher 1985: 236).This
chapter also outlines the poetics of Gravity
as a Consequence of Shape.
[4]
Previously he had been head of art at Roehampton University,
and was made a Professor of Poetry and Art in 2002.
[5] [5]
See http://allenfisher1.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/allen-fisher-confidence-in-lack.pdf
(accessed 12 October 2012)
[6] Perhaps this depends on one’s understanding of
‘lack’. One dictionary definition hovers between options: ‘a thing absent or in
short supply’. To return to somatic examples, a ‘lack of potassium’ in the body
is most likely a deficiency rather than a complete absence. To have confidence
in lack, confidence in a lack, or a
lack of confidence is strangely indeterminate therefore.
[7] My
quotations come from an online copy of a Victorian illustrated text: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/08/02/quarles-emblems-1886/
(accessed 14 October 2013)
[8] [8] As the
earlier essay of Traps puts it: ‘The
correlation and meeting of the patterns of connectedness that constitutes
consciousness and the patterns of connectedness that encourage beauty in the
process
and object of art, come together, at best, as an
imperfect fit, an essentially incomplete expression, potentially brought
towards completion each moment the receiver, viewer or listener, encounters the
work.’ See http://allenfisher1.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/allen-fisher-traps-or-tools-damage.pdf
(accessed 12 October 2012)
