It seems he has been absorbed (or nearly absorbed) into a mainstream
narrative about British Poetry. It’s one you see played out in the cases of Ken
Smith or Denise Riley, as well. They are lifted out of the periphery into the
mainstream. Almost.
I am accused of a certain kind of adversarial criticism,
which pits a perceived mainstream (‘The Movement Orthodoxy’ that certainly
existed until at least 2000, when I lost interest) against its Other (for which
we have contested names, and, although I’m uninterested in that contest, I’ll
accept, with responsibility, the imperfect notion of innovation). But then if
the Mainstream is reading this work (let’s return to Fisher) it will read it in
a certain way, extracting the anecdotal and the humorous rather than the
distanciating and the formal, which is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. To
read it as radical may also be, but at least it is a minority view, in
contention. All of this (which I’m finding hard to articulate, even to myself)
is best illustrated by looking at a quotation from Roy himself.
(Note: would it be interesting to write a book on Roy and deliberately NOT
quote him, since he is still, in some ways, the best commentator, or the most
authoritative, on his work, not an ideal situation, critically speaking?)
He writes to Paul Lester (who had written a pamphlet on his
work some time in the 1970s, but was delayed by some years in publication (I
think I have it somewhere)). (Those who don’t remember these years will perhaps
wonder why Lester self-published his critical piece. At that time, it was not
easy to write much in established (if not establishment) journals about a poet
like Fisher, certainly not before OUP published his Poems 1955-1980 in 1980. My 2005 book The Poetry of Saying was based on my 1979-87 work on a PhD: it took
25 years to be able to be able to publish such a book: thank you LUP!)
Roy
was clearly replying to Lester in the early 1980s, given the references to Ash
and to appointments of Poets Laureate, by which time the binary ‘underground’/establishment
had been replaced by the binary of innovative/mainstream, with which it is not
completely identical. It is also odd that the passage is clearly raising a
question that is not broached in Lester’s (if I remember, politicised) reading
of Fisher’s work. But I’m running ahead of myself here. The piece is reprinted in the Shearsman book An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose
1963-2013 and here’s the apposite passage:
It’s not part of your purpose to examine the relationship between ‘underground’ and establishment poetic activity, but it’s a question I seem to have raised merely by existing. The two forms of activity seem to me to be demarcated not by a division of substantive issues but behaviourally, by the centripetal effect of a pair of rather turgid whirlpools in different parts of the pond. What distinguishes one from the other is a difference in the conception of how the group and its activities relate, ethically and functionally, to the society. In these terms of allegiance and operation, although I’m obviously much more interested in the actual poetics current in the ‘underground’ group, I don’t feel drawn by the gravitational pull of either. For me, to ‘go underground’ and remain there would seem pretentious and academic, just as to ‘go’ in the other direction in the hope of finding a location would seem fatuous. As a result, I get used as a between-worlds counter in reviewers’ debates, as in Peter Porter’s recent discussion of John Ash’s experimentalism, where I’m the excellent Roy Fisher, whom nobody suggested should be Poet Laureate. (p. 160)
I propose to analyse this sentence by sentence. (Wouldn’t I
rather be writing poems? What about that book on Frank Sinatra and me?)
As I said, Fisher raises a question, here presented
existentially, that Lester doesn’t ask (which is why I will not consider his, Lester's,
piece further, but stick to Fisher’s argument): ‘It’s not part of your purpose
to examine the relationship between ‘underground’ and establishment poetic
activity, but it’s a question I seem to have raised merely by existing.’
As I’ve said, this uses two terms that were already outmoded
by the time Fisher was making (or, at least, publishing) his response. The
terms are political in origin (just as ‘avant-garde’ is military: the demon of
analogy leads us into strange back alleys and mugs us). But Fisher is thinking
of the term ‘underground’ as used by the 1960s counterculture generally and
more specifically as it is used by Michael Horovitz in Children of Albion (a 1969 anthology Fisher shares with other members
of the British Poetry Revival, as I would prefer to say, and others; so Andrew
Crozier is ‘in’, but Ted Milton is ‘other’ in my reading). The ‘establishment’
is a word that has a particular period stink: one thinks of Peter Cook
lambasting the House of Lords or the complicit judiciary (say, in the Jeremy
Thorpe trial), but the term was used of publishing to mean the big publishing
houses (Cape, Faber, etc) which carried lists of mainstream writers, metrically
decorous and rhetorically restrained (largely; there were always exceptions, a
built-in ‘Get out of jail card’ the establishment always reserved for a rainy
day; in Thorpe’s case, quite literally, of course.)
So we can update the binary (The Poetry of Saying in dealing with this period favours The
British Poetry Revival and the Mainstream Orthodoxy, which doesn’t mean that I favour these terms, but I’m going to
need to adopt some such for this analysis). But we broadly know what we mean,
socially and aesthetically.
‘It’s a question I seem to have raised merely by existing.’
The passive stance here attempts to drain agency from this positioning. He
didn’t join either side in his
writing, if these camps are regarded as matters of aesthetics or poetics. Indeed,
‘The two forms of activity seem to me to be demarcated not by a division of
substantive issues,’ we are told. Not by ideas. ‘The two forms of activity seem
… to be demarcated … behaviourally, by the centripetal effect of a pair of
rather turgid whirlpools in different parts of the pond.’ Here, the emphasis on
behaviour takes us away from aesthetics, perhaps into politics, but he is not
yet clear at this point. It is perhaps about groups and belonging, Mods and
Rockers rather than Beats and Academic Poets (though even that US binary
involves a distinction between certain kinds of sexual and social decadence and
decorum, as it were).
More importantly, we have the introduction of the central
conceit of the passage: the spatial. This is appropriate for the author of City – but it is also strangely
congruent with the spatialisation of cultural groups and affiliations in the
work of Bourdieu: the field of
cultural production as a plot colonised by those groups. (Let’s use that
later.) What Fisher posits is more dynamic and fluid: ‘the centripetal effect
of a pair of rather turgid whirlpools in different parts of the pond’. Each
turgid (sluggish, slow) involuting force, ‘moving or tending to move towards a
centre’, away from each other, is self-involved. Similar in motion, of course,
but with a ‘difference in the conception of how the group and its activities
relate, ethically and functionally, to the society’, a formulation that implies
that the ‘underground’ is oppositional, while the other is normative: the
never-meeting worlds of the commune and the family, the peace march and the military,
anarchy and ‘culture’, very different societal ethics. Even: free verse and
free love against conventional metrics and conventional marriage. These are
essentially ‘terms of allegiance and operation’, in Fisher’s words, of social belonging
and doing, behaviour (or habitus, to reintroduce Bourdieu for a moment). ‘I
don’t feel drawn by the gravitational pull of either,’ Fisher says, slightly
complicating his image of the two whirlpools, in that gravitational pull isn’t
really a matter of choice. But the word ‘drawn’ (as in ‘I was very much drawn
to the piano playing of Lux Meade’) does imply volition, although the state of not
being drawn is ambiguous: is that resistance, or simply non-attraction? The
context implies the latter, although the qualifying subordinate clause of this
sentence is, for me, the clincher: ‘although I’m obviously much more interested
in the actual poetics current in the “underground” group.’
Let’s repeat that: ‘I’m obviously much more interested in
the actual poetics current in the “underground” group.’
The use of the word ‘poetics’ animates me, of course. (I
take it in the sense I use it as the speculative discourse about how one makes
art, the structural principles behind it, though even if Fisher is adopting it
as in the stylistics that he used in his MA thesis on Mailer (yes! true!) it is
instructive. ‘Actual poetics’ means the principles behind, or beyond, the
apparent (or surface) beliefs of the ‘underground’. He is, in short, expressing
an affiliation (however nonchalantly expressed as ‘interest’) with the
modernism and American poetics that underpin the best of the ‘underground’
work: again, a broadly shared set with Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, John James,
and Gael Turnbull, rather than with the work of the more socially-identifying
writers in Children of Albion. (Let’s
spare naming them, because some of them changed later.) He could not go
all the way (I repeat the spatial metaphor for a reason): ‘For me, to “go
underground” and remain there would seem pretentious and academic,’ Fisher
says. The spatial metaphor ‘under’ ‘ground’ suggests invisibility, being buried,
as well as subversion, but Fisher (no child of the sixties) could not become a senior
Timothy Leary figure (or better, closer to home and also of poetic pedigree, an
Alex Comfort figure). (Christ! Roy
would have laughed his head off at that! But Comfort was the budding (wrong
word), up and coming (worse!), poet of the 1940s, according to Francis Scarfe.)
Roy was jazz, not
rock ‘n roll, and not even modern jazz, let alone free jazz. ‘Academic’ is an
odd word to use of that possible choice.
In any case, that form of invisibility was rejected, yet so
was visibility, expressed in his last spatial metaphor: ‘Just as to “go” in the
other direction’ to the mainstream (my spatial metaphor) or the (literary), ‘in
the hope of finding a location would seem fatuous.’ A location sounds like a
place to operate from, a base camp, an institution even. Centred on a pedestal.
What Fisher doesn’t ask, at this point, is whether they would have had him,
allowed him location in their domain. Certainly not at the height of the
Movement, as Fisher acknowledges later. ‘I owe CM a debt of understanding,’ Fisher wrote of Christopher Middleton
in around 2012, in a short note:
At a time when the Sunday broadsheets still carried reviews of new poetry there appeared a review of his book Torse #3. [sic] The piece was by its own standards civilised: but it was patronising, ignorant, insular and weary. I had at that time virtually no contacts and no prospect of getting a book published; but I was working tentatively in a distant corner of the same territory, and the review showed me in an instant how the cards were stacked. It freed me from setting any store by opinions that might come from such a quarter. (Fisher 2014: 196)
Another spatial metaphor, note, in that ‘corner’, and one
that suggests distance (from both Middleton and the Movement, the note implies).
‘It freed me’ is important, in
acknowledging a liberating invisibility, as opposed to the ‘academic’ burial of
the counter-cultural underground. This itself should be some sort of a
riposte to those who see Fisher as ‘absorbed’ by the mainstream and ‘its
standards’ (neatly summarised by Fisher as ‘patronising, ignorant, insular and weary’).
But by 1980 or so he was aware that he was a ‘counter’ in an
argument about the field of literary production, again a passive party, when he
declares, ‘ I get used as a between-worlds counter in reviewers’ debates,’ and
I suppose I have been one of those reviewers. (See my reviews of Fisher for the
Times Literary Supplement: 'Timeless
Identities' (Roy Fisher) here.
And my 'Commitment to Openness' (on Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth) here.)
But at the time (and Fisher refers to this review several times, though it is not
of himself, but of John Ash, he states: ‘In Peter Porter’s recent discussion of
John Ash’s experimentalism … I’m the
excellent Roy Fisher, whom nobody suggested should be Poet Laureate.’ (p. 160) Well, I would never have made
that suggestion either (though somebody at his funeral told me that when his
domestic phone rang the day Ted Hughes died, Fisher leapt to his feet and
cried, ‘It’s the Palace!’ but devotees of Fisher’s humour will recognise the
self-deprecatory tone here!). The humour deflects from the point that he would
not be appointed as an establishment stooge – and nobody expected him to be. He’s
not on that list. Neither would he be crowned hippie King of the May, like
Ginsberg in May 1965, in Prague.
(See my PN Review review of Ash here,
at a time I was turning away from his work and finding less of the
‘experimental’ in it than I had hitherto.)
BUT the clause ‘although I’m obviously much more interested
in the actual poetics current in the “underground” group’ brings us back to
poetics as a speculative, writerly discourse, and the word ‘obviously’ suggests
that his relationship to the
‘underground’ was palpable to all who might choose to see it. But even Porter’s
review suggests he won’t fit into the
mainstream, even if he had tried to locate
himself there. He never was a half-way house and his interest in the avant-garde poetics demonstrates that (at the very
least) he was not looking both ways, but looking chiefly towards the
underground for poetics and poetic analogues and homologies. (But he’d not be
averse to being published in mainstream contexts: I suppose such a refusal
would be ‘academic’: he isn’t J.H. Prynne.)
If I write a book on Fisher, I would write about that
‘actual poetics’ in relation to Roy Fisher’s poetry – but also about the actual
poetics of his own poetry. For I take the point of his social and behavioural
resistance to the pull of the underground seriously (as I do the terms of his
exclusion from, and wariness towards, the mainstream). But he is not a lone
wolf (anymore than Barry MacSweeney was) but he’s no card-carrier. He’s also
(and this also should be obvious) in
possession of his own poetics that would be the main focus of the book.
Trial and Error: the underground as trial; the establishment
as error.
Robert Sheppard
June 2018
[Update 2022: I have discovered the quotation from Fisher I needed to seal the argument above: ‘I enjoy innovation and I think I can think best
in a radical position; the further I can take that, the better I work … unwilling
to let go all sorts of fruity and fulsome sides of literature, and I always
want to find ways of taking some of the richer and more meaty sensations of
writing or of the arts into more and more radical situations.’ (p. 42 of Interviews
Through Time, Shearsman)]
Other Links
See also
for my account of Fisher’s ‘Untitled
Note’ in ‘Tributes to CM’,
in
http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page10.htm
in which Fisher’s is one of a number of fine tributes to Christopher Middleton.
The Note (and his reply to Paul Lester) is also published in Fisher, Roy. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013. ed. Peter Robinson. Bristol: Shearsman, 2014: 196. Buy the book here.
The Note (and his reply to Paul Lester) is also published in Fisher, Roy. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013. ed. Peter Robinson. Bristol: Shearsman, 2014: 196. Buy the book here.
I have more on Roy Fisher here:
See also my own take on
Christopher Middleton, published in The Wolf, which kicks off with the
same Fisher 'note', here.
(There is more on Middleton on this blog
here and here
and here.)
Finally there’s more on the British Poetry Revival, both
socially speaking and as a repository of a poetics, here, a recent piece,
and here, as I write of it in The Poetry of Saying:
And definitions of poetics here:
