I
first came across Roy Fisher’s work as a teenager in
Kingstanding Library a couple of years before going to
university in 1977. I had a typical adolescent's taste in
poetry - the Keats, Rimbaud, Shelley, Ginsberg rebellion
thing - but it was rather eclectic too, and on the top shelf
of the poetry section was City, alongside Lee
Harwood's White Room and one or two other items an
enlightened sub-librarian had smuggled onto the acquisitions
list. I was fascinated by it and took it out several times,
trying to make sense of it. I didn't succeed at that stage
of my encounter with it; nevertheless, reading City
at that time of my life meant that he has a special place in
my personal pantheon. The slightly baffled attraction I felt
back then also included the fact that we shared a native
city. Handsworth, where Roy grew up, was just three miles
away from where I lived, on the same 90 and 91 bus route
that passed near my home.
Not
that I read City in a literal, descriptive way even
then, but I could see that at one level it dealt with the
wholescale redevelopment of the Birmingham I lived in, and
which was still going on apace. Its demolished Victorian
terraces reminded me of Aston, the district adjacent to
Handsworth where my grandmother had kept a corner shop, and
what was replacing them was writ large in Spaghetti
Junction, the tower blocks of Perry Barr, and the Rotunda
and the Post Office tower serrating the city skyline. But
the other levels of City - its phobic, solipsistic
air, its disconcerting oscillation between realistic and
subjective - I wasn't as well equipped to deal with,
although I recognised a wry wit and amused stoicism, the
flipside of Brummagem ebullience, which resembled my
father's deadpan humour. I appreciated its apocalyptic
flavour too, although I could see that it was of a drily
undemonstrative kind. I liked also that there was none of
that nostalgic craving for uncomplicated belonging which
often accompanies the mapping of local co-ordinates in
poetry. If City put Birmingham on the late modernist
map, it did so in a rather abstract way which could apply to
many other cities, never naming the place. If the attention
it paid the city was a form of homage, it was backhanded:
'This could never be a capital city for all its size. There
is no mind in it, no regard. The sensitive, the tasteful,
the fashionable, the intolerant and powerful, have not moved
through it as they have through London ... Most of it has
never been seen.' This ambivalence matched my own feelings
at the time. To me, what was distinctive about Birmingham
was that it was a junction, a crossing point in the middle
of the country - a nexus, rather than any kind of special,
static space. A few years later, in the final year of my
English BA degree, I wrote my extended essay for the Modern
Poetry 1930-1970 course on Roy's work. It hadn't been taught
on the course, but I felt that doing was a necessary
assertion of my own identity.
Fast
forward about a decade and, after being side-tracked into
PhD research on more conventional poetry than Roy's, I found
myself in my first teaching post, at Leeds University, and
in charge of something called The Poetry Room. This involved
organising three-four poetry readings a year. For most of
these I took suggestions from my elders and betters; Roy was
my choice, the only one I got to make on my own. He duly
came and read, and read well. I don't remember anything much
more about his visit, except that the turnout was low,
undoubtedly as a result of my poor organisational skills,
and that he read A Furnace in its entirety, which
meant there was no time for him to read anything else. He
was on something of a mission with it, as it had been
published fairly recently, and was new to everyone there. He
told us it was the best thing he'd written, and said,
half-joking, that we should teach it on a contemporary
poetry course. He was right on both counts, although it
never became a set text. If some of us were sceptical, it
was probably because we were disappointed he hadn't read
poems we knew, such as 'The Entertainment of War' or 'The
Thing About Joe Sullivan', or - a personal favourite of mine
- 'Barnardine's Reply'.
Jumping
another decade, and not long after another reading, this
time in Swansea with Gael Turnbull, following which we'd
briefly chatted, I realised that 2000 would be Roy's
seventieth birthday. I'd recently undergone something of a
Damascene conversion to innovative poetry, which I'd
neglected since my teens. Reading Ted Berrigan, John
Wieners, Denise Riley and Drew Milne I was reminded of my
early interest in Roy's work, even though theirs was very
different. So, when I heard about a trio of books being
published to mark the occasion, I offered my services. I
reviewed The Thing About Roy Fisher and news for
the ear for Poetry Review, and both of them,
plus Interviews Through Time, for - I think - Poetry
Wales. A few months later I had an email from Roy
thanking me, and mentioning that John Kerrigan, through whom
he had tracked me down, had lent him a copy of my first
collection, A Birmingham Yank, which had appeared a
couple of years previously with Arc.
It was
exciting to learn this, but unsettling too, given that I'd
recently revised my notions about poetry so radically, and I
mentioned this in my reply to him. The problem was that Yank
was shaped by what I'd studied for my PhD - all well and
good in itself, but it meant the poems in it were in regular
stanzas, usually pararhymed, chock-full of proper nouns and
historic figures, and rounded off with ringing final lines.
Not Roy-ish at all, in other words, although the title could
conceivably be taken as a condensed description of him and
his influences. It is actually an Irish term I'd picked up
in Cork when I taught there in the early 1990s; it's applied
to a returned migrant, full of swagger and cash, who claims
to have been in the USA, but in truth only made it as far as
Birmingham. A fake, in other words, which is how I feared I
might appear. Even so, I couldn't resist sending Roy his own
copy.
I
needn't have worried about his response. I'll quote it in
full, partly because I think it sheds light on his own work,
partly because it testifies to his characteristic generosity
even towards someone whose stuff must have seemed pretty
uncongenial:
You
were right to say it's not up my street, but only in the
sense that mine's a street where there are no names on the
shops (or indeed on the streets) and in which nothing of any
importance, ever, perish the thought, ever happened or could
happen. The Great Ones of our civilization always did their
things elsewhere. But I think you handle your bundle of
wonders with tremendous brio. I remarked to John
Kerrigan that there was no room for false steps in that kind
of writing. I got an image of a poet talking, talking while
walking at speed backwards into - ie straight through the
scenery - a stage set where cabbagy people were sitting
around watching an untuned TV. I don't know whether they
paid any attention. It'll be interesting to see whether the
new direction you said you were working in carries the Crack
with it.
A lot
of this confirms what we know, I think - including Roy's
unequivocal rejection of authority and officially-defined
'importance' ('perish the thought'), something I'd not fully
grasped the extent of in my politically callow first
encounter with City. But what's most revealing to
me, reading it now, is how the Goodby scenario so swiftly
turns into a Fisher scenario - the 'talking, talking' poet
who is going 'backwards' metamorphosing into one who breaks
through the surface of empirical reality to enter what seems
like the domestic-surreal space of Ten Interiors with
Various Figures of 1966. 'Cabbagy people sitting
around watching an untuned TV' could be an out-take from
'Experimenting', or 'The Wrestler'. It's the best kind of
nudge in a different direction while at the same time
brilliantly insightful about certain aspects of Yank.
Something
Roy
and I must have discussed along the way were our Birmingham
links, the extent of our social and cultural consanguinity.
It turned out there were two main areas where our
trajectories touched and overlapped. One was the Birmingham
Jewellery Quarter. This is located in Hockley, a district
between Handsworth and the city centre; it was where Roy's
father and grandfather had worked, and also where my
father's father had worked. My father and brother still
worked in the Quarter at that time, and I knew from a day
I'd spent going through microfiched parish records in
Birmingham Central Library, years before, that our line of
Goodbys had lived in and around the area as far back as the
mid-eighteenth century. Numerous male members of the family
had been jobbing jewellers, or active in the related trades
of toy-, button-, and pin-making. The history of the
Fishers, though over a shorter period, had been much the
same. Roy and I were taken with this, and I vaguely recall
exchanges involving the respective merits of the Roseville
Tavern and the Jewellers' Arms, the names of firms on Vyse
and Spencer Streets, and the clepsydra mechanism of
Chamberlain's Clock - not to mention the Lucas' factory in
Roy's poem 'For Realism', where my grandfather and two of my
uncles on my mother's side had worked. Less anecdotally, I
also seem to recall us discussing how the nature of
Birmingham's industry - much of it small scale,
workshop-based, semi-skilled ('The City of a Thousand
Trades') - had shaped the structures of feeling of its
inhabitants, and whether it had entered his writing in some
way.
Second,
there was Kingsland Road Infants and Juniors School. This
was where I went between 1963 and 1969, and it dawned on me
that during his time training teachers, in the 1960s, Roy
might have had to observe trainees in action there. When I
asked him it turned out that he had (I think this kind of
inspection trip may what he's engaged on, 'between two
calls', in the trolleybus journey described in the 'Introit'
section of A Furnace). Hence - there was no way we
could be certain (but then what could be more Fisheresque
than that?) - the possibility that our paths had crossed
decades before. I imagined myself, the seven year-old future
reader of City, sitting in a classroom just in front
of the recently-introduced stranger, Mr Fisher, there to
assess the pedagogical skills of, say, Miss Parker (soon to
give up teaching thanks to the likes of Paul 'Porky'
Bagshaw, who once filled the pockets of her coat with used
chewing-gum in the morning break). I told him it was a poem
I felt I would have to write some day, and he seemed to
approve.
I'd
promised Roy that if he ever wanted me to ask my father
anything about the Quarter - since he'd worked there since
1947 and was still going strong - I'd be happy to oblige.
Our last exchange dates from 2005, when he emailed to ask if
my father remembered the firm of Goode, where his
grandfather had worked 'from about 1880 to 1930', and did he
remember which street it was in. The query arose from 'a
flurry of ancestral quarrying' into the Fisher genealogy in
which, Roy said, certain things fitted Birmingham's boom
years exactly:
A pair
of no-doubt-impoverished farming people came in the
mid-1820s from what had been centuries of immobility in the
villages around Edge Hill, travelled up the A41, found work
in the button trade and bred. A daughter married a bastard
(literally) called Fisher, an electroplater, probably at
Elkington's, and had ten children. A further large
generation followed. The interesting thing, by its very
ordinariness, is that for three generations all of these
people seem to have lived their entire lives quite securely
within a single square mile of Lozells-Hockley, in
newly-built and pretty uniform terraced housing; an area now
gone but which I once knew well. Men and women alike were
employed in the fancy metal trades, first brass then gold
and silver. ... Nobody moved until my generation, born
between about 1916 and 1936, had education thrust upon it,
and the inevitable diaspora. The generations have dwindled
dramatically, and have no members in the city. ... I get
very interested in the minutiae of the local map of homes
and workplaces. We [Joe, Roy's son] use old maps and
obsolete A-Z street maps, and my childhood memory, which is
of course now much clearer than my control over
comparatively recent PC files.
Unfortunately,
my
father had no memory of Goode's, and I told Roy - somewhat
apologetically, as I'd set my father up as a fount of all
knowledge - that I'd drawn a blank. I don't think this was
due to some lacuna in my father's memory; rather, it's most
likely that the firm went bust between 1930 and 1947. There
was no reply, and I felt it would be pushy to follow up
after a silence. This was probably an error on my part; Roy
was conducting his researches with his son Joe, and I think
a response may have slipped between the cracks of their
joint effort. In any event, it was the last time we were in
touch - the next thing I heard about him was when he died,
twelve years later, in 2017.
But
he's still occasionally on my mind, chiefly because his
poetry is a body of work I keep returning to, and possibly
also because I've slightly conflated him with my father;
they were contemporaries (my father was born in 1932),
looked roughly similar, shared certain traits, and died at
almost the same time (my father's death was just a year
before Roy's, in 2016). Perhaps the two things come together
in Roy's approach to genealogy and the past, summed up in
his well-known phrase 'Birmingham is what I think with' -
his interest in it being, of course, like his sense of
Birmingham as a place, not for the usual sepia-tinted
reasons. He had no truck with idealisations of the lives of
the working poor, or the usual kind of memorialisation of
them, or in redeeming them in his poetry. Rather, his
interest seems to have stemmed from the personal necessity
we all share of having to come to terms with our own
mortality, and which therefore grew stronger over time, and
a concern with obliquely recognising and restoring some
measure of dignity to those lives, those forebears. The
political aspect of this is already there in the early
poetry: City's focus on 'marginal people', and the
cold contempt for them of their rulers, reflected in 'The
Wonders of Obligation' and a memory of the Blitz: 'the mass
graves dug / the size of workhouse wards / into the clay //
ready for most of the people / the air-raids were going to
kill ... provided / for the poor of Birmingham' (the killer
phrase is 'provided for'). Here again there is overlap,
since a great-grandfather, John Henry Goodby, died in the
bombing of Birmingham, just as Roy's aunt and her family do
in 'The Entertainment of War'; and when her father
eventually succumbs to the grief of losing his favourite
daughter - 'Then he walked out and lay under a furze-bush to
die' - the furze-bush was in Sutton Park, where I played as
a boy. The sympathy, like the anger, is undemonstrative,
creative, and feels close.
As
several critics have noted, this concern for the way the
dead and living comingle, the dead never really going away,
the living so often leading zombie-like existences which are
death-like in their unfulfillment, accounts for the gothic
feel of some of the poetry. But this inter-involvement has
its positive aspect too, and recognising the hauntedness of
the present is the way Roy's poetry grants the dead their
measure of dignity. The figure for this, which is a process
rather than a static state, is the double spiral which
structures A Furnace, but which occurs in slightly
different form in earlier works too, most notably the 'coil'
and 'whorl' of the opening of The Cut Pages, a
seminal work of 1970 which in its odd way may be considered
the link between City and A Furnace.
The
emphasis on process rather than a fixed condition is
strongly reminiscent of a poet we might not readily
associate with Roy; namely, Dylan Thomas. And yet, as he
told John Tranter in a Jacket interview, the very
poem he wrote, 'when I was nineteen', was 'a cheap trip
through Dylan Thomas's stage properties'. In a letter to Jim
Keery of 1998 he confirmed this: 'it was reading Thomas that
enabled me to start. It was like one of those astronomical
events where a body is struck by another and kicked out of
its familiar orbit into a new one, by way of a violent
wobble. ... It was ... the spectacle of something apparently
quite primal ..., a sort of linguistic/imaginative magma,
unsuspected innards, the breaking of taboos one hadn't known
existed, that shook up my innocence.' All of which, given my
own deep involvement in Thomas's work, is another connection
with Roy. It's also another kind of haunting, since it
reveals Roy's roots in 1940s Apocalyptic poetry and the
larger issue of how, despite its critical demonisation, that
poetry secretly shaped many of the more interesting poets of
the last seventy years, from W. S. Graham to Sylvia Plath
and Ted Hughes. The tale of that 'interfluentiality', to use
Jim's nicely flowing word, like my poem about my possible
early encounter with Roy, is one that remains to be written.
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