On Roy Fisher’s
behalf, welcome to this strand of his afterlife – he’d be
entertained at the delays, beyond anyone’s control, getting
his posthumous existence underway. Being late for your own
funeral (he wasn’t, generally he was an excellent
timekeeper) turns out to be the easy part.
Roy liked this sort of project, friendly enough to be open
to whoever fancies it, not striving to belong to a
mainstream but ready to take its place in the academy if
that’s ever useful. He read every Powys Society newsletter,
for example, in that spirit. It kept important things live
and was sociable too. Roy loved gossip and was a
considerable one himself. Whether he was OK to become the
story is another question. Approaching the end of his life
he was very comfortable with his body of work being out
there on the record and was clear-eyed about what he’d done
and its relative merits. Suppressions and excisions had been
decided long ago. As Peter Robinson continues to discover,
the same applied to his extensive notebooks and
correspondence: Roy gave the impression for years that he’d
burned them or shortly would, but the archive as Peter and I
found it makes clear that wasn’t what he really meant. He
knew we’d be the first finders. He knew what we’re like and
will certainly have anticipated our delight at the treasure
house on our hands. But then realise he’d got in there
before us to redact, though sparingly.
Roy never to my knowledge felt he had the right to tell
anyone else how to live, and though he took the piss widely
wasn’t censorious. It just seems right to apply the same
principle to the material he left behind and let posthumous
Roy have a wander round (he called it going out for a snoop)
and find his own level. In the company of good friends who
don’t switch off their critical faculties feels an ideal
place to start. So afterlife, begin!
Amanda
Bernstein
The Roy Fisher Archive at the University of Sheffield
Library: an introduction
The Roy Fisher Archive at the University of
Sheffield Library consists of many hundreds of items, and
was generously donated by Roy’s daughter Sukey Fisher. It
was packed into the back of a car and made the scenic
journey from Newcastle-under-Lyme to Sheffield on 26 January
2018. This is a brief description of the contents, which I
hope will reveal the scope and importance of the archive to
the study and research of Roy Fisher’s work, and to that of
modern British poetry in general.
The covid19 pandemic
prevented the installation of the university’s exhibition of
the Roy Fisher Archive in the summer of 2020, what would
have been Roy’s ninetieth birthday. The exhibition is now
planned for 2022. The pandemic has also prevented me for now
from completing the cataloguing of the archive. We will
announce in a future edition of the Newsletter when the
archive will be open to researchers. In the years
immediately after leaving university, and qualifying as a
teacher, Fisher began his teaching career at the grammar
school in Newton Abbott, moving to further and higher
education, finally employed by Keele University for most of
the 1980s before leaving to make his living by poetry and
music. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature in 2005. The archive traces Roy’s artistic life
from the 1950s onwards. What becomes apparent is that he
kept almost everything ever sent to him, which offers the
researcher a unique well-rounded perspective on all aspects
of his life. Roy Fisher was both
poet and jazz musician and was well respected in both
worlds. He worked closely for many years with artists Ron
King (at Circle Press) and Ian Tyson (at Tetrad Press).
Roy’s long association with BBC radio generated a number of
programmes recorded over a span of roughly forty years. Such
programmes included: ‘Poetry Now’, ‘Words’, ‘The Living
Poet’, ‘Not Now I’m Listening’, ‘Sounding Off’, ‘A Word in
Edgeways’, the World Service series ’Poets on Music’; and
two programmes produced by Fraser Steele, ‘Just After Four’
and ‘Take the Money and Run’. Transcripts for all of these
programmes are included in the archive. Roy was also
profiled on film in the documentary Birmingham Is What I
Think With (1991), produced by Tom Pickard. The
archive holds the script, filming schedule, drafts of the
theme poem, and correspondence with Pickard. The film
includes footage of Roy as jazz pianist performing with
other musicians.
Correspondence
The bulk of the
collection consists of correspondence. Roy Fisher cultivated
a vast network of poet friends and colleagues in the UK and
the US. He was a great letter writer and corresponded with
over four hundred poets, writers, artists, and academics. Occasionally
correspondents
included unpublished poems or drawings of their own with
their letters. Roy’s long-term
correspondents included Jim Burns, Richard Caddel, Andrew
Crozier, Simon Cutts, Ian Hamilton-Finlay, Michael Horowitz,
Tim Longville, Edwin Morgan, Jonathan Williams, Ian Tyson,
Ron King, Stuart Mills, Stuart Montgomery, Eric Mottram, Tom
Pickard, David Prentice, Michael Shayer, and Gael Turnbull. Roy had a long
association with Gael Turnbull and Michael Shayer whose
Migrant Press published Roy’s first pamphlet, City,
in 1961. Roy also helped in the administrative work of
Migrant, the file for which also contains mailing lists and
accounts information dating from 1966 to 1969.
Some correspondents
are represented by only a letter or two: Allen Ginsberg, the
infamous Harvey Matusow (who sent Roy a life membership
certificate for the International Society for the Abolition
of Data Processing Machines), Bernadette Mayer, Liz
Lochhead, J. H. Prynne, Tom Raworth, Barry MacSweeney, Fay
Weldon, and Marguerite Harris, the founder and director of
the Woodstock Poetry Festival. Roy’s jazz world
correspondents included George Melly, Brian Peerless, Ken
Rattenbury, John Reade, John Taylor, Derek Webster, Gerry
Ellis, and a postcard from one of Roy’s heroes, Bud Freeman. The
large
Ron King/Circle Press file includes King’s sketches and
prototype experimentations for major works such as Bluebeard’s
Castle (their first collaboration), Anansi
Company, and Tabernacle. There is also a large
section on the London Series, a sequence of pamphlets
produced by Ron King at Circle Press, for which Roy engaged
fellow poets Gael Turnbull, Libby Houston, Wendy Mulford,
Kenneth White, Jeremy Hooker, and Asa Benveniste to each
supply a poem.
Roy saved all the invitations he received to read at
festivals, schools, colleges, and universities; and all
correspondence from societies, groups, and associations such
as the London Poetry Secretariat, Association of Little
Presses, the Poetry Society, the Arts Council, and West
Midlands Arts.
Publications
The
Roy Fisher Archive contains an eclectic collection of
pamphlets and issues of magazines, school magazines, and
other publications sent to Roy from his friends and
colleagues at small presses. The collection includes two
issues of Birmingham University’s Carnival to which Roy’s
first wife, the artist Barbara Venables, contributed
cartoons; the William Carlos Williams memorial issue of
books u.s.a. (inscribed to Roy by Jonathan Williams); the
first issue of Apple (1967), edited by David Curry in
Illinois; the undated first issue of Eleventh Finger, edited
by Paul Evans; early issues of Long Hair (1965), edited by
Barry Miles; Loot (1979), edited by Paul Green; Open Skull
(1967), edited by Douglas Blazek; and the Birmingham
University student magazine, Tuppence.
Victor Coleman sent Roy many examples from his Island Press,
as did Andrew Crozier from his Ferry Press; Simon Cutts and
Stuart Mills from their Tarasque Press; and Ian Hamilton
Finlay from his Wild Hawthorn Press. Preserved in this
section are unique ephemeral pieces created for Roy
personally, or inscribed to him.
Workbooks and Notebooks
The archive preserves Roy Fisher’s workbooks and
notebooks—over a hundred of them—dating back to the 1950s
and written in his highly legible hand. Ordered by date,
they contain jottings of poems, thoughts, ideas, notes,
dreams.
Manuscripts and Typescripts
The many manuscripts and typescripts in the archive include
Early poems and prose 1 (1949–1961), which contains a
typescript of The Memorial Fountain; and Early poems and
prose 2 (1960–1972) which gathers Hallucinations,
Metamorphoses, A Sort of Visitor, Homage to Joe Sullivan,
‘Three Early Pieces’ (1953–1954), and ‘Stopped Frames and
Set Pieces’. Other typescripts include City, City II, The
Ship’s Orchestra, and The Cut Pages. After the death of Gael
Turnbull in 2004, Jill Turnbull returned to Roy the
typescripts of three early collections inscribed to Gael
from Roy: The Ceremonial Poems (1966), Poems 1966, and one
of the four copies of The Collected Uncollected Poems (a
rarity produced in December 1969).
This section also preserves original artwork by Roy Fisher,
cartoons and caricatures doodled on scraps of paper, or in
the margins.
Early drafts of Roy Fisher’s major published works—alternate
versions, reworkings, and revisions of various poems—are
present in the manuscripts and typescripts section.
Translations
The archive contains Roy Fisher’s translations (ca.
1969–1971) of Franz Schubert’s song cycles Winterreise, Swan
Song, and Die schöne Müllerin, and a photocopy of a printout
of Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems, translated by Fisher and
Valentina Polukhina.
Interviews and Articles
A section of interviews with Roy Fisher includes the
transcription of a conversation with Eric Mottram for The
Poetry Society from 1971. Among other transcripts is ‘They
are all gone into the world: Roy Fisher in conversation with
Peter Robinson’ (1998). Also contained in this section are
copies of articles about Roy and his work. There is also the
file of correspondence between Roy and Derek Slade for
Slade’s Roy Fisher: A Bibliography.
Teaching
Roy Fisher was a well-liked teacher. The archive traces his
progress through the education system—in correspondence,
applications, and CVs—from Devon to Keele. From the
mid-1970s through the late 1980s, Roy tutored at Lumb Bank,
the site of the Arvon Foundation’s residential courses for
adults. He also ran the course ‘Writing Poetry’ at Belstead
House in Ipswich in 1983.
Jazz
The section on jazz consists of a folder of correspondence
from musicians, gig organisers, and fans; plus ephemera
relating to the Musicians Union dating from 1958 to 1999,
flyers and posters.
*
The Roy Fisher Archive is a chronicle full of humour,
insight, and humanity. Preserved here are glimpses of Roy’s
private personality: jokes between friends, drawings, the
great poem ‘I am not afraid of writing a great poem’, and
finally, kindly donated by Sukey, Roy’s favourite Parker
pen.
