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Clive Bush

The Yale Journal of Criticism, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2000,

pp. 107-128 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/yale.2000.0005

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/yale/summary/v013/13.1bush.html

Access provided by University of California @ Irvine (14 Aug 2014 01:48 GMT)

Clive Bush
In Sight and Time: Some Patterns of Appearance in
Roy Fishers Poetry

How full the impression of timelessness at noon, the knife-edge balance of existence when
even breath may hardly whisper. Here all action is purely mechanical, mere appearance. Nothing matters but a long, full glance within.
Paul Klee1
As a child I was a graphic artist and painter chiefly.
Roy Fisher2

Roy Fishers poetry is about what you see and what you dont see.
In an afternoon of dazzling sunlight in the thronged streets, I saw at first no individuals but
a composite monster, its unfeeling surfaces matted with dust: a mass of necks, limbs without
extremities, trunks without heads; unformed stirrings and shovings spilling across the streets
it had managed to get itself provided with.
Later, as the air cooled, flowing loosely about the buildings that stood starkly among the declining rays, the creature began to divide and multiply.At crossings I could see people made of
straws, rags, cartons, the stuffing of burst cushions, kitchen refuse. Outside the Grand Hotel, a
long-boned carrot-haired girl with glasses, loping along, and with strips of bright colour, rich,
silky green and blue, in her soft clothes. For a person made of such scraps she was beautiful.3

For the relatively few people who read Roy Fishers work with any attention it is
axiomatic that Fishers native city of Birmingham is what he thinks with: the apparatus with which he interprets the world.The landscape of Fishers poetry almost always includes a meditation on the nature of representation itself and the operations
of mind. The scene engaged might offer observations typical of certain kinds of
documentary or fictive realism, as well as multiple strategies of defamiliarization that
range from the visionary to the ethical. The seeing negotiates multiple possibilities which include both the twentieth-century and the contemporary alongside the
legacies of previous centuries. In the two prose stanzas (taken from a longer sequence) quoted above, it would be a mistake to see a linear progression of enlightenment. Klees timeless mechanism of noon will only be partially challenged by the
declining rays, which suggest a deeper romantic truth delivering its post-Eliot
vision as the second paragraph appears to revise a vision of a Dantesque hell. Here
beauty is integral to scraps or fragments which are not shored against anybodys
ruins. But it is important to note the ambiguity of the construction of the sentence
For a person made of such scraps she was beautiful. It not only revalues something
The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume , number (): 107128
by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press

clive bush

that has not truly been seen for what it is against a vision of a tempting and too ethically insistent wholeness, but also simultaneously recognizes, dispassionately, the loss
of that wholeness. Even more subtly it articulates the depredations of the neurotic
desire for wholeness that produces composite monsters at the same time as it suggests the angel in the puppet.
The ghosts of past visions and ways of seeing haunt Fishers work in a drama that
compels its own precisions.The drive in the poetry is to find a visionary time and
space that still lets the real world in. At the heart of this there are ethical decisions:
Once I wanted to prove the world was sick. Now I want to prove it healthy.The
detection of sickness means that death has established itself as an element of the
timetable, it has come within the range of the measurable.Where there is no time
there is no sickness.4 The poetry, however, makes few obvious gestures to ethics;
rather it offers a world in which the traditional choices and values are destabilized,
forcing a reconsideration of the customary.
To begin with, Fishers poetry renegotiates two locked thematic oppositions
which have haunted poetry since Baudelaire. The oppositions, which like all either/ors are formally conservative, place an anti-nature (Comte) against what
Baudelaire himself called the soul of the sanctified vegetable. (I am, wrote
Baudelaire,incapable of getting worked up about plants.)5 In this way of thinking,
Reason and Grace no longer illuminate and transcend the natural world but are replaced by a new mechanism, fully authenticated by the power of the then-new industrial revolution. Nature has been transformed by work and thought, and Baudelaire challenges the pastoral/industrial opposition by eliding one of its components.
Traditionally, the city itself is characterized as a space dominated by machinery,
alienating transport systems, mineral transformation, the abstract forces of commerce, gigantism, sin, the accelerated control and rationalization of every aspect of
life from sex to money-making and security, and the regrouping of the consequently
atomized individual via interest. Polluted by day, garish by night, the city is paradoxically offered to us as at once ur-reality and diseased reality.The most contemporary and sophisticated of commentators still bring with them echoes of the classical opposition of rus/urbs, virtue/vice. Here is Virilio on Les Halles in Paris,
lamenting real natives and proper country people:
The passers-by that one sees in this repainted decor have all become foreigners in their own
country, tourists in their own city, strangers to each other. They are, nonetheless, all wellknown to the police.
Air-port-style commerce and art are no longer reserved for the shop windows of international terminals: the historic center of cities also offers the tired pedestrians airport architecture, the works and imbecilic games of these false natives.6

Perceiver and perceived undergo complementary metamorphoses.The place of the

romantic wanderer is taken by the flneur, the flneur by the anthropologist of
tourism on an academic grant and the Parisian Jeremiah.Appearance and the self are
simultaneously half-understood among these changes, manufacturing each other as
both are made over in reciprocal hallucination.
Rimbaud was more sophisticated, foregrounding his poetic quaintness rather

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than assuming it as a foundational nostalgia.Within a readopted antique,poetic

vision, materialization becomes a pure form of soul:
La vieillerie potique avait une bonne part dans mon alchemie du verbe.
Je mhabituai lhallucination simple; je voyais trs franchement une mosque la place
dune usine.
Poetic quaintness played a large part in my alchemy of the word.
I became an adept at simple hallucination: in place of a factory I really saw a mosque.7

The key words become habituai,simple, and franchement. Nothing, ironically,

could be simpler, clearer, nor indeed more common and repetitive. Baudelaires and
Rimbauds progeny have been numerous. But here is Benjamin on a different form
of hallucination, one which will interest Fisher a great deal, the animate/inanimate
substitution:
Green is the supreme luxury of the Moscow winter. But it shines from the shop in the Petrovka not half as beautifully as the paper bunches of artificial carnations, roses, lilies on the
street. In markets they are the only wares to have no fixed stall and appear now among groceries, now among textile goods and crockery stalls. But they outshine everything, raw meat,
coloured wool, and gleaming dishes.8

Something, however, is added to the navet of pure artificiality whose stable

essence is assumed to be automatically dehierarchized by virtue of appearance in the
merchants equalizing context.This fable of paradoxical materialist irony both challenges and retains the natural-unnatural opposition within a universal materialization.
Something, however, escapes this elegantly written simplicity. What is added to
the Baudelairean inertia is the surface shining: the paradoxically unmasking forms
of appearance. Art for arts sake was the spiritual counterpart of the materialists abstracted distance of the object from its use value. The pure reflection of light, in a
purely painterly vision, defamiliarizes the object to be decoded by this old-world
pioneer-seer.The purely formal plays about the object declare and paradoxically refute the materialist soul with an absolute confidence.When Benjamin theorizes his
position, this time in relation to the apparently arbitrary appearance of conjunction,
the inertia of revisionist irony becomes more readily apparent:
Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension
becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the
Communist Manifesto. For the moment only the surrealists have understood its present commands.They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock
that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.9

In the contemporary world it is harder to see precisely where this surreal materialism breaks the seal of its substitutions and ends the boredom of precocious equivalents whose operation is guaranteed by the same abstracting and materializing
processes.The problem, further, is that when the human face as clock rings its alarm
continuously, after a while nobody notices or accepts it as real because the effect of
contrast has been swallowed up in customary and repetitive exchange.What if the
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profane and sacred, the real and surreal are indistinguishable because the physis that
is being organised for it [the body of the collective] in technology, can, through all
its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us?10 Finding a profane illumination becomes harder in
the contemporary world given the commercialization of these oppositions. Benjamin sensed the problem when he noted that Rimbauds Saison en Enfer no longer
had any secrets for [the surrealists].11 At the beginning of the new millennium, it
has become obvious that the surrealists mockery of a world which collapsed in
has in turn become the clich of every advertisement and movie whose hyperreal
special effects are often most brilliant in inverse proportion to their psychological
and narrative crudity.
Fishers work devotes itself to a recovery or rather a reinvention of a profane illumination by renegotiating the terms of the symbolists and the surrealists contract:
I want to believe I live in a single world.That is why I am keeping my eyes at home while I
can.The light keeps on separating the world like a table knife: it sweeps across what I see and
suggests what I do not.The imaginary comes to me with as much force as the real, the remembered with as much force as the immediate.The countries on the map divide and pile
up like ice-floes: what is strange is that I feel no stress, no grating discomfort among the confusion, no loss; only a belief that I should not be here. I see the iron fences and the shallow
ditches of the countryside the mild wind has travelled over. I cannot enter that countryside;
nor can I escape it. I cannot join together the mild wind and the shallow ditches, I cannot lay
the light across the world and then watch it slide away. Each thought is at once translucent
and icily capricious. A polytheism without gods.12

Read aloud and slowly, the lines begin to answer many of the issues raised so far,
and with an indefinable lyrical beauty. They throw down a challenge to the theoretical and narrative confidences of any critic, for it is a lyricism which carries the
sharpest of propositions.This impulse to unity produces multiplicity. Home is redefined as an act of visionary imagination as well as a refusal of the cosmopolitan.13
The world seen with courage necessarily presents a force of some violence, revealing a visionary scene of relentless defamiliarization that undermines at home as a
space of domestic certainty. Fisher extends Keatss sense of negative capability to include a sense of illegality (a profanity at once welcomed and disturbing) alongside the
non-judgmental acceptance of the world as given.The impulse is to take movement
and time out of the picture as a heuristic challenge to a world grown neurotic with
manufactured desire and the sentiment of death. The line I cannot join together
the mild wind and the shallow ditches, I cannot lay the light across the world and
then watch it slide away is dense with contending meanings. But to consider the
force of the I would be a beginning. Its difficulty is the degree of its confidence.
The light of the mind, by analogy, in almost Coleridgean correspondence, challenges
the confidence of the thinker.The metaphysical underwriting finally demands the
authority of multiple visions, but without the gods.
It is unfair but perhaps essential to place such a passage against one by Americas
greatest commentator on the city, Lewis Mumford:
No human eye can take in this metropolitan mass at a glance. No single gathering place except the totality of its streets can hold all its citizens. No human mind can comprehend more

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than a fragment of the complex and minutely undue selectivity all that is offered by the machineand demand nothing that is not produced by the machine. The whole organisation
of the metropolitan community is designed to kill spontaneity and self-direction.14

In the light of the Fisher passage, why would you want to take it all in at a glance?
What autocratic nostalgia for what lost world is this? And if not the human eye,
whose eye, and if not the human mind, whose mind? Is it not possible to rethink
the fragment? How much of Mumfords stress is given in advance? Is he not laying the light across the world and watching it slide away? And no citizens of any
country were ever together in one place.The problem is that Mumfords infantilized
urban automaton and Virilios decentered flotsam have stubborn ways of finding
admittedly sometimes against huge oddsother times than those in which they are
constructed to order.To be sure, they occupy and are constructed by a city,gateless, in which the here and there have disappeared into a computerized timetable
and where the frontiers of State have passed into the interior of cities.15 But the
aristocratic gaze of Baudelairean nostalgia lingers on, and the question is rarely asked
for whom exactly was any historical configuration good. The eyes, in Fishers
words, are rarely at home. Rarely, too, do the familiar gurus look at the world from
the ground up. Just off the freeways, under the cloud of green house gas and airnoise pollution, in the diminishing space beyond the surveillance camera, outside
and within the rituals of police, court, and the prison, under the gaze of the mania
of the administrator who is convinced that nothing unexpected must ever be allowed to happen, there are ways of seeing, living, and experiencing whose complexity defeats the binary simplifications of prophetic pessimism and optimism (not
to mention the apocalyptic determinisms within all constructions in which the
idea of nature from the Enlightenment blurs into the real).16 And what of those
billions who actually live in the debris of the gigantic wastage and manufactured
needs of contemporary techno-commerce? The child who remembers a world unfolding in a supermarket parking lot with a bag of chips dreams as much as one who
remembers a madeleine.
In Roy Fishers words:
So there were no clear distinctions between the town and the country.The cemetery and the
golf course had wild edges to them, and the desolate reed-bordered pool that was the destination for special excursions lay, with a complete scenic rightness, under the arid, black and
red-brown spoil help of Jubilee colliery, with its baleful flat top and the deep scars of rain
channels running down to the thickets of alder and willow round its base. Nobody ever suggested in my hearing that the collieries or the cemetery or the allotments were spoiling the
landscape.They were part of it. It was a particular type of countryside that had those things
in it.17

Before moving on to Fishers actual poetry it may be salutary to recall that the English and American poets of the city have always responded variously to the urban
experience.Whitman had deployed an explosive drama of the coupling and decoupling of the self within a panoramic perspective of massified groups to attempt to
overcome the contradictions of the natural representative one and many in Enlightenment theories of individual liberty. Baudelaire, as noted, from a position of
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extreme political conservatism, icily and brilliantly embraced the citys rejected historical vestiges in the secret and hoped-for glory of the saints self-flagellating and
morbid excitements. In the twentieth century, Hart Crane saw in the citys technology a neo-romantic, nationalist deliverance as well as torment, and found its
speed both intoxicating and hallucinatory. Frank OHaras fastidious and humorous
choices gave a vibrant sense of creative survival and dispassionate democratic juxtaposition of the citys objects and possibilities (with hot dogs peanuts and pigeons
wheres the clavichord)18 and offers a marked contrast to most urban poets as his
slow and happily cultured intellectual gaze ruminates without the shackles of nationalist myth or authenticating centers and boundaries. Here the city without gates
is simply celebrated as such. Ginsbergs inversion of Whitmans hopeful panoramas
made New York a swirling nightmare of Poes hideous dropping of the veil where
pure speed gathers and disperses, barely held in check by the skillfully readapted
modes of ritual incantation. Iain Sinclairs London (more celebrated in novels than
in poems these days) is a place where a Conradian Thames grotesquely illuminates
the criminal underworld of the imperialist and post-imperialist city. Sinclairs fascination is fastidious, unremittingly melancholy and aristocratic in its discriminating
surveillance of the historical detail and its ghostly underworld myths.
Allen Fisher has articulated the nightmare of London as a construction of technomathematical intersections operating at high speed, but the bleakness of his vision is
palliated by a rare sense of humor, a countervailing sense of a particular history in a
particular place and a painters feel for the immediate and local. In this latter sense
only is he close to his namesake Roy Fisher, who has also a certain kinship with
William Carlos Williamss similarly painterly sense of the thing seen.Yet Paterson relies on an evolutionary metaphysic of emergence, gathering, selection and dispersal
metaphorically indicated by the falls and the river of the old mill town (and a revised nationalist perspective) which is entirely absent from Roy Fisher.There is perhaps too in the American poet (and Fishers admiration of Williams is profound)
more confidence in the power of art to transcend the world. There is a sense in
which Birmingham thinks Fisher as he stands more helpless before it, in a way in
which Paterson, brilliantly held off under a doctor-biologists scrutiny, never quite
thinks or overwhelms Williams. Their strengths and points of attention are simply
different.19
After London, Birmingham was the most important industrial city of Victorian
England; a seething mass of foundries, railways, canal intersections, small skilled
workshops of every conceivable metalwork trade that depended on coal and iron.
As Fisher encounters it, it is still a city of perpetual transformation, twice laid out
in the shape of a wheel,20 but whose ghosts of buildings and roads speak a derelict
presence at every turn and every corner. This is not the Royal, Administrative, Financial, and Legal two-thousand-year-old center of a Nation State, as London is,
with its Cathedrals, Museums,Art Galleries, and its links with the ruling class of the
English shires. Rather, it is of recent growth, a child of the industrial revolution. It
became a cradle of the new world of technology and science with skilled engineers,
chapel non-conformity, free-trade, Samuel Smiles-like self-help, in some ways a mess
of a city with fitful public largesse:

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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 moved through London, evaluating it, altering it deliberately, setting in motion wars of feeling about it. Most of it has never been seen.21

Such a city would provide a temptation for a poet less talented than Fisher to create an image of it as a site of anomie, ennui, a wasteland of the human spirit. For
reasons already given, Fisher simply rejects the possibility.As a child, Fisher recalled,
there was something addictive about my appetite for the beauty of the great rusting sheds, the tarry stinks, and the slimy canals of Smethwick. It was a lonely and gigantic landscape with hardly anybody in it.22
Fishers technique involves suspending conventional judgments, attacking the cultural perceptions (predominantly visual) of time, space, and history, and doubting the
nature/anti-nature opposition.The suburb, for example, escapes, even if by the skin
of its teeth, both banality and its predetermination as middle position:
This suburb like a sleeping hand,
With helpless elms that shudder
Angry between its fingers,
Powerless to disprove it.
And, although the wind derides
The space of this stupid quarter,
And sets of the time of night on edge,
It mocks the hand, but cannot lose it;
This stillness keeps us in the flesh,
For us to use it.23

The skillful use of the comic double rhyme and the final stopped half-line create a
strange atmosphere in which half-rhythmic memories of the non-conformist hymn
(Each little flower that opens), the air of sacred punditry, serve to illustrate a fundamental tenet of Fishers poetry, in which the natural and the constructed are for
ever at a critical distance from each other but with neither providing the base line
of authenticity:The society of singing birds and the society of mechanical hammers
inhabit the world together, slightly ruffled and confined by each others presence.24
Of course the piety is both used and challenged:This stillness keeps us in the flesh, /
For us to use it precisely separates stillness from any quietude of spirit, and suggests
that flesh and soul will have a new relation within stillness.
Much then informs Fishers seeing.The complexity of the multiple perspectives
is easier to demonstrate in a single poem.The shape-shifting and overlapping sets of
patterns that characterize Fishers poetic world are nowhere clearer than in the appropriately entitled poem Metamorphoses. Section of Metamorphoses begins with
a glimpse of red beans, an image which immediately begins to break at the edges:
Red beans in to soak.A thickness of them, almost brimming the glass basin, swelling and softening together, the colour of their husks draining out to a fog of blood in the water.25

The image disperses as it is offered because the truth suggested here is scientific.You
cant see soaking or softening or a draining out, and even a thickness of them
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only hovers at the edge of the visual.Yet it also prepares us for the most visual, almost archaic metaphor of a fog of blood in the water, with its narrative implications of threatening evidence offered and obscured at the same time. Is the glass
basin the retort of this transformation or a barely adequate container as the measures
of the cook threaten to overflow?
In the first movement the poet is disposed to generalize and abstract, so that
quantity replaces quality as the object of the gaze:
The mass of things, indistinguishable one from another, loosing their qualities into the common cloud, their depth squashed by the refraction and obscured in the stain, forms pushed
out of line. Five beans down it may be different.

The phrase common cloud (with its anthropomorphic hint of common crowd),
together with the words squashed and obscured, does not suggest confidence in
the abstract order. Refraction and stain, and the forms pushed out of line, suggest
a greater authenticity in the nature of appearances, though they may not necessarily offer order as such. In this context,Five beans down becomes half-humorously
ironic, as the arbitrary but small number invites at least a suspension of judgment
on the inevitability of this massification. The next shift moves to the process of
thinking itself:
Down in the levels, its possible to think outward to the edge; with a face to the light, theres
no looking out, only hunching before the erosion.
Back!

The very triumph of the romantic movement,downwards through the levels, that
confidence that the deeper movement provides both the unique edge of danger
and unique illumination, proves to be illusory. Setting out as Ahab, the poet returns
as Ishmael.The result is to be without bearings in a world where the binary axes of
the eyes themselves provide a depth of vision not altogether trustworthy.
In the midst is neither upward nor downward, head nor foot has precedence or order. Curved
belly rises above, warm and shining, its navel out on the surface with the vestige of a lip. One
eye is enough, to distinguish shape from shadow, paired eyes would fix too much.To be fixed
in the midst is suffocation.

This erotic center is detached from movement and thinking; the shape of a lip is
only an archaic trace of speech.The binary construction of depth on a surface has
to be broken, shape distinguished from shadow, which is to question the construction of shape by shadow in traditional representational art. And thickness, too, is
different from the midst, its location precisely more ubiquitous and uncertain.
Here a world constructed in twos or pairs is thrown into question.
So in the thick of the world, watching the moon whiten the bedroom floor and drag the
print of the window nets higher and higher across the wall; thinking how the world would
have had a different history if there had always been not one moon in the sky, but a close-set
pair. It is said there are two breasts; it is said there are two sexes.Thats as may be.

The it is said is the real become nature which has to be dissolved by distinguishing the midst from the thickness of the world. Here the moon becomes the single

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eye, using shape to define the demarcations of shadow and light even as it combines
them to project almost cinematically the effect of the intervening human artifice on
the bedroom wall. The surreal and humorous suggestion of the close-set pair of
moons and the claim that the renewed inference would have upset history itself
cast doubt on the grand narratives based on familiar icons of nature that legitimate
human enterprise. Returning immediately to the theme of doubleness, Fisher
doubts the usefulness of normative history guaranteed by any sort of pairing.
Melvilles lines come to mind:What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder / The human
integral clove asunder / And shied the fractions through lifes gate.26 And it is the
great Melvillian theme of light and dark that Fisher brings back to earth in the final stanza:
Out in the moonlight is a short street with only one side; houses on it, and walled forecourts.
Over the way is a white pavement, and a blackness where the hill falls away. The blackness
goes grey with looking and the valley is full shapes.

The section ends in only apparent simplicity. The sense of definition is absolute, a
hammering of propositions. The double street is but a single side, the edge where
the urban constructed meets the natural shape of the landscape, absolutely generalized as hill and valley.This suggests an almost story-like closure of the distancing gaze, the final long shot of the movie. Here white meets black, pavement meets
hill, yet in the final transformation the distinctions are dehierarchized in the moonlight as grayness and pure shape.
Fisher is interested in how things arrive where they are, and how they are in turn
noticed or thought about.There is less location, more of what he calls a sweep of
direction:
Out of a scratch ontology the sweeps of direction form, and, as if having direction, produce,
at wide intervals, the events.
These are wiry nodes made of small intersecting planes as if rendered by hatching, and having a vapid, played-out look. But they are the nearest the field has to intense features. Each
has a little patch of red.27

The moment of coalescence is a moment of both danger and definition. As in

Gertrude Steins famous essay on Composition as Explanation (), the key issue is the time in and of the composition, and what comes into focus and how it is
recognized. For Fisher, this includes a perception alive to multiple perspectives, ethical, psychological, political and even economic, as in Handsworth Liberties:
With not even a whiff of peace
tranquilities ride the dusk
rank upon rank,
the light catching their edges.
Take masonry
and vegetation.
Witness composition
repeatedly.28
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This vision is close to that of DArcy Thompson, whose capacity to generalize biological structural morphology across habitual distinctions of appearance was important, for example, for American poets like Charles Olson who attempted to work
out in their poetry a neo-nationalist universalist geo-history as a combination of
ideal and real polis.Yet Fishers Discovering the Form shows a very different approach to this complex of issues:
Discovering the form of vibrancy
in one of the minor hilltops,
the whorl of an ear
twisting somewhere under the turf,
a curve you have to guess at.
In a house out of sight round the shoulder
out of ordinary earshot,
a desperate mother, shut in with her child,
raves back at it when it cries,
on and on and on, in misery and fear.
Round on the quiet side of the hill
their shrieks fill an empty meadow.29

The form of vibrancy is of supreme importance to Fisher, who is also a musician.

Every sound, said Paul Klee, is already a vibration of the material air, so subtle
that on its own it can be perceived only as a higher or lower tone. Such melodic
music-making would be sensed as inanimate. It is precisely the vibrato that alters this
chilly impression.30 If the structures are ubiquitous, they are not necessarily music.
DArcy Thompson has less than a page on the subject, but speaking of the relation of
diameter drum or tympana of various animals to the rate of vibration, he concludes:
Structure apart, mere size is enough to give the lesser birds and beasts a music quite different
to our own: the humming bird, for aught we know, may be singing all day long.A minute insect may utter and receive vibrations of prodigious rapidity; even its little wings may beat
hundreds of times a second. Far more things happen to it in a second than to us; a thousandth
part of a second is no longer negligible, and time itself seems to run a different course to
ours.31

Hence vibrancy as abstract structure, with its universal laws and operations, simultaneously connects us with and separates us from the animal and physical world.The
details are fascinating, opening philosophical speculation as to our place in this
world, particularly in relation to contemporary sciences fascination with seats of
energy and centers of force.These perspectives help Fisher to defamiliarize the landscapes offered by poetry in its struggle to renew its own language.Yet as Thompson
also reminds us, Consciousness is not explained to my comprehension by all the
nerve-paths and neurones of the physiologist; nor do I ask of physics how goodness
shines in one mans face, and evil betrays itself in another.32
Fishers work often seems to engage these two perspectives simultaneously. In a
way, they fight it out in his pages, in an effort to render the particularity of the mo

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ment more consciously.There is no attempt at synthesis or reconciliation, but rather

an experience of contradiction which sometimes addresses the process of composition (linguistic, visual, and auditory), an activity that appears to have something in
common with other types of scientific or artistic thinking.
In these complex ways much of Fishers poetry offers an open-ended definition
of vibrancy. In Discovering the Form, structure will finally coalesce absolutely
(and therefore fatally and pessimistically) with a human cry of pain. The first assumption in the poem is that the minor hill top is coming into view as a site of the
form of vibrancy. The value-charged adjective minor, in relation to the cosmic
ubiquity of the form of vibrancy, sets two assumptions and two perspectives
jostling.The inference is that at one level all forms of life are connected. But its not
at all evident where that level is. The ear itself is a form that discovers form but
whose ear is it, and is this whorl the whirling fly-wheel regulator of the system (as
in mechanics) or is it the reactive shape of biological circumstance and force? And
what is this thing twisting surreally under the turf, the shape of whose direction can
only be guessed at, not measured, but which suggests a more intuitive measurement,
in Pounds directive, by the ear? In fact, the worlds of ear and eye are at odds in
this poemand at the level of sheer sound,whorl and curve play their contradictory consonants and almost imperfect rhymes about a more flowing line which
both separates them and holds them together with a light alliterative touch.
With the introduction of house, which pairs with hill, the poem takes on a
quasi-allegorical tone, such as one might find in a poem by Emily Dickinson.This
is nowhere and everywhere, recognizable and undefined, familiar only in the resonance of the first apprehension of the words relation to its signifier: the house, the
hill, the meadow, all bearing a freight from the childrens nursery rhyme to the
Spenserian allegory. Of course it is out of sight. It is as much guessed at as the preposterous proposition of earth as ear, or the hill as shoulder, and its out of ordinary
earshot as well:out of, in the sense that it has used up all the familiar connotations.
There is an insistent defamiliarization into which is dropped the desperate mother,
shut in with her child, which now acquires all the aura of unmediated reality in the
very ordinary language of the proposition. Nature is supremely calculable.There is
nothing to be guessed at here.What form of vibrancy is this when a cry of pain, in
the most familiar language of romanticized clich (in misery and fear), insists on
taking over the calm of scientific meditation and intuition, without irony or indeed
obvious judgment?
In the last stanza, the one word that is significantly illuminated is empty.The cry
of suffering empties the confident world of the scientists plenum of forces or centers of energy, the long perspective of evolution or geology, the reassuring eternities
of the sub-particle world. The desperate continuity of behavioral predictability of
the trapped mother and child is certainly an eternal moment here, and it is not benign.Thompsons I do not ask of physics how goodness shines in one mans face, and
evil betrays itself in another is not a gesture which acknowledges the fact before
the return to science. Rather it brings the whole process up short, because the impersonal nature of the final proposition reverses its own apparent simplification. In
the full context of the poem, it is not the shrieking of mother and child which fills
clive bush

the meadow that is important, rather it is the fact that their predetermined suffering makes the elaborately constructed context (from physics, to allegory, to pastoral)
empty of a significance which has been elaborated without regard to that suffering.
Fishers work in a sense takes on and illuminates a familiar current proposition,
that history is not privileged in relation to the binary, tertiary, or quadruple structures offered by the anthropologists and others. Fisher examines the affective consequences of such a proposition and pokes fun at the abstract claims of those who
would so confidently describe the world in terms of its invisible inertias. He also
slyly uses it to describe the dominance of the literally constructed cityscape which
inhabits so many of his poems. One typical movement is that the pattern so described is in contention with what is organized by it, with the two elements competing for evaluation.
The gantries of the travelling cranes hit back at the sky in the afterglow.
All structures are mysterious, however the explanation goes.
In a place like that, virtually everything is a structure.
Wherever the floor or the crust of the ground is opened, indoors or out, there is revealed
some part of the continuous underwork: a tarry pipe, a gas main, a pot of still yellow water.
Grammar of my journey through the streets, through the rooms and halls. I sense my movement always as forward and express it so. I ignore my ability to turn left or right. Or to glance,
or to think, aside. My whole tortuous track warps into a single advancing line.This warping
hardly shows in the stations of my path, even the unspiral staircase, but it has many consequences in what lies beyond or beside what I travel through. All the same, Im prevented by
definition from knowing what those consequences are like. If I even think about them they
swing into place directly ahead of me, and in doing so they straighten themselves up.33

The spin, so to speak, given to structure here is not easy to read. It moves through
a number of definitions: the obvious violent contention of mechanism with the
natural world; a rigidity wrapped in mystery; the sense of some kind of ur-ground
historically and technically constructed.Yet Fishers statement about what lies beneath the floor or crust is not a statement of preference but of disembodied fact, and
its dogmatism places grammar on an edge between recognition of necessity and
imposed control.
There is an extreme self-consciousness here in this expression of direction which
is unspontaneous, logical, and determined.The contradiction is that the straight line
he chooses through the streets, rooms, and halls is warped into its direction. But the
warping, half set in motion, half collaborated with, itself is a kind of spatial silence,
a determining absence which seems to have authority beyond the stations of the
path and the unspiral staircase. These two latter phrases are of course densely
charged. Stations suggests stations of the cross, and path has all the traditional
accretions of the poetic way.The unspiral staircase suggests, by negative definition, the opposite of Blakes visionary winding stair.The sense or intuition of this
vision of warping is only fitfully glimpsed.The peripheral vision is key, since it is of-

t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m

fered as the context of thinking itself. What happens at the side of the line both
hides and discloses the line.
The Ships Orchestra, which is the last poem I look at here, is a case in point. It
captures many if not all of the issues touched on above. By any standard it is a disturbing poem, its roots in any number of key works, not all modernist: Sternes Tristram Shandy, Swifts Gullivers Travels, Poes Arthur Gordon Pym, Melvilles Confidence
Man. Fisher also shares with Williams Burroughs a capacity to capture image,
sharply-defined narrative fragments, and sound bites in sardonic, melancholy and
clinical juxtaposition.
Philosophically the perception of oneself in the world and by others is a crucial
theme in this mid-century poem and a consideration of this alongside some of the
key tenets of Sartres work would certainly be illuminating, as would a more psychoanalytic approach.The poem presents representations of culturally conditioned
desire and gender behavior in relation to the body, and the poems narrative fragments would doubtless allow one to build a case. Merleau-Pontys work, too,
would prove a most useful analytical perspective on the phenomenological drama
in all of Fishers poetry: the way the inherently intelligent senses apprehend a world
already coded. Equally, as with all of Fishers work, certain visual images and issues
of representation in modernist painting are crucial. Not just Klee but Max Ernst,
Magritte, and Dali offer images and techniques to which Fisher alludes. As Fisher
himself commented,[W]hat I talk about has body analogues all over it, because Im
a committed puritanical sensualist.34
For readers unfamiliar with the work, the poem is a series of inter-linked prose
fragments ostensibly describing a jazz orchestra, hired by a shipping company called
Foster Harris, at sea in every sense of the phrase and never being called upon to
play.35 The orchestra players are the narrator-pianist, a white Caucasian (the race
identities are insisted upon) who shares the surname Green with Merrett the saxophonist; the black and dry trombonist, Amy; Dougal, a late British empire seaport (Liverpool) Spade; Joyce, a blond from Nottingham who looks seventeen; and
one member, Henrik, who plays the trumpet and turns up from the sickbay at the
end. Identities are radically in doubt in the narrators mind, playing across possibilities of cross-gender, gay-straight, bi-sexual, and ethnic.Various expressionist and surreal characters wander across the setthe old man in a deck chair seems like a
more impotent and malign version of Osgood E. Fielding III in Billy Wilders Some
Like it Hot, and it is he who invites the Greens to dress as men, a fact which is approved of by the one married woman.There is a captain who might be a first officer, a man with an orange for a head, a convalescent woman with whom the narrator-pianist makes or fantasizes cold and disengaged loveshe seems to enjoy me
as if she were enjoying something I would not myself like36a phrase which accurately captures a self turned in a hostile manner against itself at the moment when
theoretically it has the opportunity to be most fulfilled.
The fragmentary narrative and fragmented characters are only a pretext for constructing a dream-like space in which the real world is a ghostly presence. In this diary-like set of sequences, in which there are no dates, no times, no permanently per-

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ceived objects and no obvious location, all roles are fluid and consciousness itself
seems undetermined.37 A hallucinatory set of spaces vaguely designated as a ship
provide a context for a drama in which hell is other people.They live temporarily
in enforced proximity without intimacy in the claustrophobic intestinal space of
ships rivetted iron hull. In a sense the people are dreamed by this ubiquitous machine.38 The main clue to reading the poem comes from Fisher himself:in fact the
whole point of Ships Orchestra was that I had never been a professional musician and
Id never been on a ship.39 The erotic fantasies of the bored worker, or in this case
the unemployed worker with time hanging heavily, show a ubiquitous behaviour of
half-response as a possible reaction to anything:
Amys knees touch mine as the train sways; Dougals knees touch Amys and mine; Merretts
knees touch Amys and mine and Dougals Amys, Merretts Dougals and my knees touch
Joyces as the train continues to sway. ()

Train or ship hardly matters. Like the classic American writers of the mid-nineteenth century, Fisher operates between the real and imaginary. This is a predetermined journey whose effects are first felt on the senses and then on the mind.Yet
Fisher offers no countervailing dream, nor does he suggest that somehow the situation has declined from something which once had a greater authenticity.
In fact the frontispiece and dust jacket picture are from a wood engraving by
David Jones and show a medieval ship yard overlooked by king, queen, and courtiers
on a parapet in front of a rising tower.They are toasting the work and gesticulating
with their hands and arms.40 The gaunt ribs of the partially decked ship look like an
unturned whales skeleton. At first glance its hard to see the dark shapes of the
workers carrying timber. It is as if the small dark figures are building a memento mori
for their masters and themselves. But in another sense the picture is a study in black
and white whose whirling wood-cut patterns connect animate and in-animate, nature giving a hint of the sardonic hierarchies of power in an almost totally constructed space.Two Braque-like birds dominate the top edge of the picture but are
so blended into the design that they hardly suggest spontaneous nature.They seem
rather to be icons of an aestheticized nature in the gaze of the aristocrat.The fact is,
however, that the entire landscape offers the kind of stylizationpartly determined
by the wood-cut itself, partly by the arts-and-crafts tradition, partly by a deeply visionary sense of the worldwhich, by eliding the line between the natural and the
constructed, forces a different sense of the world against its own offered and inherited divisions.
This is also why it so difficult to read Fisher with any sense of subtlety.Traditional
perceptions and values are undermined in a radical defamiliarization which extends
from the syntactical to the perceptual to the social and political.The encounter with
the world is neither that of romantic wanderer nor aristocratic flneur. The given
space or landscape will not yield to exclusive oppositions: town/country, workplace/street/house, biology/machine, interior/exterior (the last coupling is offered
both in terms of observed external behavior and the self s sense of its own interior
boundaries).
Rather than tracing the recurrences in the poem (formal, thematic or rhythmic),

t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m

or attempting to summarize the semantic movements or shifts of tempo and atmosphere across the local movement of the text itself, or analyzing the poems
techniques in some formal or abstract way, I propose to read just one longer continuous section which moves from a description of the ship to a kind of medieval dream fantasy.
In a passage that begins where two opposing accounts of the physical ship are
given, one prefaced by Reasons and the other by Reasoning, Fisher draws a distinction between those propositions which are too quick to unify the world (At any
rate the ship is unity and does one thing: it proceeds on its cruise []) and others
which propose with an almost dogmatic force of denial (the ship is not a unity
[]).The two propositions are not in fact in formal opposition.The first proposes
a normative world whose mechanization is pragmatic, in which the advertised good
life is credible, with the possibility, so to speak, of the band playing on.The second
makes the ship an occasion for mental analogy and comparison, a kind of meditative wandering, which connects it to the more general world of industry, city building, and technology. It becomes a partially visible moment in a field of the relations
of production in which utility and purpose are reduced to the least significance.41
Here is the whole of the contrary second half of the section in eight sequential paragraph stanzas:
. . . Reasoning now. The musicians dont play. No bubble. The ship is not a unity. It is not
white. It is grey, indigo, brown.Thin girderworks of green, and orange even, and coils of pale
yellow piping. It is not a series of canisters; it is a random assembly of buildings which, though
important-looking, have no proper streets between them. It does not float; its parts are arrested in their various risings and fallings to and from infinite heights and depths by my need
for them to be so.The funnel cannot be said to crown the firm structure; rather it juts rakishly over inconsequential forms and looks when the sky is dirty like the chimney of a crematorium suspended above the waves.The ship does not proceed on its cruise, but opens and
closes itself while remaining in one spot.The ocean is not a unity but a great series of shops
turned over on to their backs so that their windows point at the sky.
O captain. Is it the captain? O first officer. Is it the first officer? Etc.
Such heavy straps and buckles for so young a girl to wear! Such a stiff casing and mask, such
mechanical magnification of the voice to stridency! Such a channelled street, with iron pavements for her to strut down, so young!
Monitors, those curious warships there used to be. Little vessels that each carried one enormous gun. Restless home lives of their captains.
The rings of winter, the circles of winter.Why? the hoops and bands of frost. Cooperage that
fetches the skin off.Why circles when it goes cold.There are times when you can live as if in
a round pond, keeping on moving even when it freezes. And overlapping ponds all round,
across the gardens and the streets; making up the sea when the land stops.The rings are there
but nobody can ever see them.
Think of Joyces mother.An accordioniste, maybe, toothy, gilded somewhere, and with a hollow at her throat you could rest your nose in after a hard days work.To turn her child into
this, what can she be? The girl thinks of herself as a jazz musician; talks about Blakey and

clive bush

Roach, or mentions them when pressed.Think of Amys mother. Difficult.Think of Merretts

mother; of Dougals mother. Of mine.
He was in a garden all walled about and set amid the sea. And he came into a place where
there was a soft-faced flower like a cup on a single stem; the bloom a little larger than his own
head and its top a handsbreadth taller than he. And soon the flower lay down on a low bed
that was in the place and gave him to understand he should lie on the bed beside it. And he
did so.Whereat the flower lay close with him and softly folded him in its leaves, as well as it
was able. And he was aware of a marvellous scent from the flower, and would have swooned
etc.And forthwith the flower made great to do to unloose the fastenings of his garments, even
to the buttons of his braces.And right hard the work proved, whereas the flower had not fingers but points of its leaves only. So in this wise passed a longer while than that of all that
went before.
The rings of summer for that matter. Carry on. ()

The sequence illustrates the multiple ranges of perception that Fisher can bring into
play at any one time. In the first stanza, movement struggling with stasis and immobility is the key, as the coalescence of views on the object classically illustrates
the Merleau-Ponty paradox of perception in which immanence and transcendence
operate simultaneously: Immanence, because the perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives; transcendence, because it always contains something
more than what is actually given.42 Fisher takes that containing something more
to extremes and he deploys it rhetorically within the poetry.The first whiteness of the
ship is supplanted by other colors which come close to darkness but not black.The
black/white opposition is a strong strand among other twists of this poem, and is a
means by which an oscillation between extremes can come into being. Green and
orange are complementary oppositions in Klees colour terms.43 All the energies
work towards and away from each other, and it is possible to start from either pole.
Klee reminds us that nature takes measures to ward off the light and also warns us
against the dogmatism of the natural:The superior activity issuing from the white
pole, while valid in nature, must not mislead us into a one-sided view. Here too
struggle is inevitable, for of itself white is nothing. It becomes a force only in its effects stemming from contrast. Actually, we do not merely meet the given dark with
bright energy, but the given light with dark energy as well.44
The whole point of Klees meditations on color relations is to show their dynamism in relation both to boundary and tonality.They implode, expand, contract,
extend, shift, rotate, reflect, playing between essence and semblance. Fisher leaves out
implied verbs, forcing the reader to find the relational movement. So the semblances
of thin girderworks are imagined on another level of reality to be almost cognate
with coils of . . . piping. Movement shifts from colour and line to the question of
volumes.The reduction to linear abstraction implied in a series of canisters (which
bears other connotations of metallic/natural oppositions: bullets and flowers) shifts
to a random assembly of buildings. The expansion and contraction of analogical
inferences develop as complexly as a paragraph of Henry James. Fisher then removes
the streets and by implication the sea, and arrests their movement between the infinite pole of height and depth, with no other motive than my need for them to be

t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m

so. This is a rare moment of the dogmatic I in Fishers work as it indicates the
stress of definition under enormous pressure of exploring a world within the world,
as semblance and essence reach explosive conjuncture.
The world is suspended between the poles of height and depth, but the sense is
that the suspension is desperate. The funnel juts rakishly over inconsequential
forms, that is to say the world is so undifferentiated that activity can have no more
consequence than a manner in which appearance has neither aim nor meaning,
but only a remembered habit. And the extravagant simile (often deployed by Fisher
as a contrastive gesture in more stringent contexts) brings back the suggestiveness of
an older way of thinking, deliberately weakened, however, by the figure of speechs
declaration of likeness.The result is a further sense of inertia.The ship is now semianimate, opening up only to die. The shops on their backs are like dead fish constructing an inanimate ocean, their windows with their suggestions of blank upturned eyes making for an extravagant metaphor, perceiving the strangest similarity
in difference only to articulate a dead theme in a dead mode. This is a surrealist
painted ship upon a surrealist painted ocean.
Another theme also emerges, however, and it is one that is never far from Fishers
concerns, yet never obviously presented. This is not merely a constructed ocean
but a satire on the presentation of nature within capitalist commerce, where, as the
dead simile and the half-animate metaphor suggest, the very system of exchanges
has lost its vitality in abstraction.
The two separate short sections which follow are apostrophes: mock invocations
in indeterminate/determinate contrast.The appeal to authority by implication will
go down through the ranks and nobody will be responsible.The fetishistic image of
the trapped young woman (Joyce) matches stiff casing to street, and channelled
suggests sardonically the commercially foreordained quality of the youngs liberated airwaves and music.The cut to the image of the Monitor (the first iron-clad
warship built during the American civil wara canister of men if ever there was
one)45 continues the theme of aggressive erotic invasion and masking, and the basis
of the images violent phallicism is revealed in the frail vessels of those who in
every way man it. Restless in restless home lives is an effective transferred epithet (the term traditionally associated with the wanderer), as the sea captains authoritylike that of Melvilles monomaniac Captain Ahabis based by inference
on the fear of the acceptance of the sociality of wife and family. Interior and exterior confinements become symbiotic.
The nature of confinement is continued as the perception shifts from line via volume to circle. In Klees terms a circle is when the line moves to absolute rest yet
paradoxically describes the whole movement of air, water, and blood. Rings contrasted with circles suggest this paradox of stasis and movement. These are not the
transcendent circles of Emersonian supra-being, but the patterns of structure within
nature itself: line, circle, spiral. Hoops and bands of frost suggest natures aggressive
straps and buckles on the body but it is rematched imperfectly in the phrase
Cooperage that fetches the skin off. It is a classic instance how Fisher moves spirally, the image coming back transformed in a different place but still retaining a line
of identity.The coldness of circles is the fact that the specific life dies as well as beclive bush

ing born in the ordinary circulations of nature. Here is more than a hint of Melvilles
own voyager, making up the sea where the land stops, who knew that The invisible spheres are formed in fright.46
Hence the abrupt dissent in the next proposition:There are times when you can
live as if in a round pond, keeping on moving even when it freezes.The emphasis
here is on times breaking the absoluteness of the fatality of natural time.47 In this
respect the strange image of the overlapping ponds, invisible, structural and compensatory, is apt. In his Notebooks Klee has a page of diagrams in which two circles
intersect with two others overlapping in a concentric mesh. The spaces developed
between the lines show a number of possibilities: harmonious interpenetration, displacement with shift of center and mixed forms, interlinks in free variation, combinations of identical forms, touching, interpenetration and meshing, absorption, and
all these possibilities within two options: a constructive-logical connection or
partly free selection.48 Fishers poem of combinations oscillates dissonance and harmony between these last two possibilities.
At such a point, there has psychologically to be a break. And the prosody seems
abruptly to change the subject with an equally abrupt movement into relatively ordinary language. But the thematic links are there, from the preceding paragraph in
the land-sea connections and in the home life of the Monitors captain. The accordioniste offers harmony somewhat dissonantly.The alternative folk musician,
perhaps a little gilded in the aristocratics gaze, seems to offer a rather mechanical
compensation for the tired worker: the nose and hollow throat suggesting that the
right parts arent too much in creative harmony in this rather comic intercourse of
the organs of voice and breathing, whose conjunction might reduce anyone to silence let alone asphyxiation.
The recall of the characters mothers is a gesture of defamiliarization in two
senses. It shifts the legitimacy of characterization to a basis in Oedipal psychoses.
Joyce floats between a fantasy of her self-proposed career and the fatality her mother
has imposed on her. In this half-sardonic, half-melancholy rumination, the author
includes himself. Again the rings are invisible. The contemplation of the maternal
order prompts the prosody into a William Morris-like mini-medieval allegory with
its arts-and-crafts, half-biblical prose, structuring the Knights (metallically armored, and Ring-cycled?) erotic passive dream, in which his swoon is comically cut
off by the very indeterminate etc. The tone then changes to suggest that the assumed mode lies precariously on the boundary with pastiche.This Gawain is ready
to give in without a fight. The Ovidian flower also has problems undressing the
lover with its too literal leaves instead of fingers.The alliterative language parodically
recalls the works of Malory:And forthwith the flower made great to do to unloose
the fastenings of his garments, even to the buttons of his braces.Yet it too opens a
space to recapture the dream-like erotic quality of a suspension in time:So in this
wise passed a longer while than that of all that went before.
So much for the detail.Yet looked at as a whole there are further patterns in this
set of apparent indeterminacies. It was Coleridges Mariner who talked of a painted
ship upon a painted ocean within an absolute stillness. From there, the return to
land, after acknowledgment of the moving forms of nature and after repentance,

t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m

promised release from the burden. Fisher is, however, closer to Klees jester in a state
of trance, who might be an example of superimposed views of movement.49 In
Fisher there is no promise of the return and no easy contrast between the constructed and natural worlds. What floats on the sea changes from a white painted
hull to a visceral nightmare of mechanical intestines, to a crematorium, to an ironclad, to a walled garden.These successive images are a waking dream indicating different states of the psyche or even soul. Half analytic, certainly critical, they attempt
to connect different means of psychological, political, and ethical evasion. They
dodge and negotiate the half-responses of fractured and broken lives trapped in various discourses of illusion: religious, technological, those which engage the denial of
death, military power, and the escapist erotics of romantic regressive dream. What
they all have in common is a sense of enclosure and confinement that is at the same
time alluring and threatening.The inner world is lit for Fisher, by radically re-perceived fragments of the exterior world. The exterior world exists at the edges of
consciousness, disappearing as the inner world appears. For Fishers world is not in
the end about cities, or ships or landscapes, or Birmingham. Rather it describes with
a searing honesty the state of being at sea.
For all the contemporary techniques, whether drawn from European or American practice, the interactive and reciprocal presence of bodies, cities, and technologies, Fishers poetry is in a tradition which would not have been strange to Spenser
or Bunyan, nor to Blake, Melville, or Conrad. Like the great American nineteenthcentury writers, Fishers aim is to float real things into a fictive world and use them
without distancing them at all.50 The contemporary world has lost its passion for
what Hannah Arendt called the contemplative life, or Klee the long full glance
within against that mechanical stillness of noon.
Fisher offers a quiet drama of refusal within a non-judgmental approach to a fully
fetishized landscape. It is cunning in every sense of the word, and not without the
saving humor of someone appalled by, yet in love with, a world whose beauty as well
as dereliction has to be re-imagined in the recessive darkness of the human heart.
In Ed Dorns words, offered to Lorine Niedecker, Fisher also knows, in the fullness
of contradiction, that Such notations of an inner world are a little touchy now.51
In more personal terms, Fisher has said that it was after a childhood illness that he
could affirm the location of my imagination; its still the place I have to find in order to write, and its essential qualities never alter. It combines a sense of lyrical remoteness with something turbulent, bulky, and dark. There I dont have to bother
to grow older.52
Notes
Paul Klee, Notebooks,Volume I,The Thinking Eye, ed. Jrg Spiller (London: Lund Humphries; New
York, George Wittenborn, ), .
Roy Fisher, Interviews through Time and Selected Prose (Kentisbeare, Devon: Shearsman Books, ),
, .Thanks to Tony Frazer for a pre-publication copy.This excellent compilation of interviews
and new biographical material is the most useful volume to date for introducing Fishers work. In
consequence I have drawn on it freely here.
Roy Fisher,The Sun Hacks, in Poems 19551980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ),

clive bush

 Fisher,Starting to Make a Tree, in Poems 19551980, .

See the discussion in Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell (London: Horizon, ),
ff.The first paragraph summarizes to a degree Sartres argument at this point in the book.
Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles, trans. Mark Plizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e]
Foreign Agents Series: ), .
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varse (New York: New Directions Paperback,
), .
Walter Benjamin, Moscow, in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and
Kingsley Shorter (; rpt., London: New Left Books, ), .
Benjamin,Surrealism, in One Way Street, .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Roy Fisher,The Wind at Night, in Poems 19551980, .
I am using the word cosmopolitan in the sense that Melville did in The Confidence Man, that is,
to describe a figure whose manipulation of the set-up, loyal to no country or creed, is a confidence trick based on exploitation and profit.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History (London: Secker and Warburg, ), .
See Paul Virilio, Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles, ; and chapter one of The Over-exposed City, in The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext[e], ),
.
Virilio, The Lost Dimension, .
Fisher, Interviews through Time, . It has to be added that Fisher is here attacking the a priori snobbish romanticism of rural retreaters (actually a state of mind), which can be just as characteristic
of long-settled pragmatic farmers as of recent urban escapees. Elsewhere in this interview he speaks
affectionately of country walks with his parents:blissful, almost visionary experiences on outings
and walks, supported by an unshakeable moral faith in something called Nature.
Frank OHara,Early on Sunday, in The Collected Poems of Frank OHara, ed. Donald Allen, intro.
John Ashbery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ), .
In this respect, speaking of the work of Charles Olson and Ed Dorn, Fisher comments:And those
two, very particularly, USE the idea of location in America inevitably quite differently from the
way in which any Englishman COULD use a sense of location, or could use a sort of game of
time axis versus place axis. . . . But not for me. I mean, its commonplace to say that for an Englishman looking at place, compared to an American his thing has got to be historical. Fisher, Interviews through Time, . Fisher could also be harsh on the imitators. He wrote to Eric Mottram
on May :please dont give a whisper in your review that might cause me to be bracketed
with the dreadful Projective little eyases [sic] that are springing up daily from the Essex marshes
and the Cambridgeshire fens. Incredible that it should have happened this way. What a bloody
country. Itll be nice to have something said about the Orchestra at last. Eric Mottram Archives
[//], Kings College, London.According to Roy Fisher (in an e-mail to the author, Jan.
), the imitators were the prolix flood of quasi-Projectivism which was merely trend-following which appeared amid the considered work of Crozier, Riley and Prynne.All quotations
are used by permission of Roy Fisher and Kings College, London.
Lullaby and Exhortation for the Unwilling Hero, in Fisher, Poems 19551980,
The Sun Hacks, in Fisher, Poems 19551980, .
Fisher, Interviews through Time, .
Fisher,The Wind at Night, in Poems 19551980, .
Fisher,North Area, in Poems 19551980, .
Fisher,Metamorphoses, in Poems 19551980, . No further references will be given, since the entire section is on this page.
Herman Melville, After the Pleasure Party, in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P.
Vincent (Chicago: Packard and Company, Hendricks House, ), .
Fisher,A Poem Not a Picture, in Poems 19551980, .
Fisher,Handsworth Liberties, in Poems 19551980, .
Fisher,Discovering the Form, in Poems 19551980, .
Paul Klee, Notebooks,Volume II,The Nature of Nature (London: Lund Humphries: ), .
DArcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
), .

t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m

Thompson, Growth and Form, .

Fisher,Releases, in Poems 19551980, .
Fisher, Interviews through Time, .
The purely formal aspects of Fishers work would repay careful study (particularly the lineation
and rhythmic aspects) provided that his own words are kept in mind:I decided that Wittgensteins
Tractatus was a very splendid sort of stylistic influence for one to adopt, and I paid far more attention to the Tractatus as a mode of lineation, say, than to any poet. And similarly, in more recent
years, I have enjoyed the way Cages thinking moves in his writing more than almost any poet.
It was a pleasant moment when I could abandon metre, about which I do know something, and
write a-metrical language, which in those days [the time of writing The Ships Orchestra] always
had to be called prose. Fisher, Interviews through Time, , .
Roy Fisher, The Ships Orchestra (London: Fulcrum Press, ), . All further page references are
given in the text.
I cheated insofar as I had certain revolving themes which I would feed in when the thing started
to slow down so I had numbers of little themes which kept coming round; but basically I would
perfect every step and cut it and phrase it so that it would stand, and then I would write the next
piece on the support of that, which meant that could no longer alter what had gone before.
Fisher, Interviews through Time, .
In a letter of Dec. , Fisher more humorously advised Mottram to enter the mechanical
dream in a way that marked off a bitter sense of isolation from Birmingham and those of its inhabitants who had no language for where they were:Have you seen these car-washes with gigantic blue or orange whirling cylinder-brushes that shimmy all over & around the car? I went
through one today, & into the Claes Oldenburg world.Take a taxi through sometime. Or several
taxis.The Birmingham Post has just asked me for a poem about Christmas; with local colour.Yowsir.
The goose is getting flat. Eric Mottram Archives [//], Kings College, London.
Fisher, Interviews through Time, .
Fisher was happy with the way the book lookedit is in fact beautifully done. In a letter of
Jan. to Eric Mottram, he wrote: Ive delayed replying because Ive been waiting to have a
hardback Ships Ork to send to you. I hope you like the way Stuart has got it up: Im well satisfied,
and, for once, quite pleased at having written the thing. Eric Mottram Archives [//],
Kings College, London.
Fisher rightly refuses to be tied to a priori ideological positions. His Englishness makes him suspicious of writing whose ideology is given in advance, and his non-Englishness once led him to declare of himself:Hes about as right-wing as Luis Bunuel. Fisher, Interviews through Time, .
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays in Phenomenological Psychology,
the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Chicago: Northwestern University
Press, ), .
See the color plates on pages and of Klees Notebooks II, where he talks about colour relations in terms of complementary oppositions.
Klee, Notebooks II, .
As an American literature teacher, perhaps Fisher might have known Hawthornes famous piece
on it: It could not be called a vessel at all; it was a machineand I have seen one of somewhat
similar appearance employed in clearing out the docks; or, for lack of a better similitude, it looked
like a gigantic rat-trap. It was ugly, questionable, suspicious, evidently mischievousnay I will allow myself to call it devilish; for this was the new war fiend, destined, along with others of the
same breed, to annihilate whole navies and batter down old supremacies. Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Chiefly about War-Matters, by a Peaceable Man, Atlantic Monthly (JulyDec. ): . Roy
Fisher, who saw this essay before it went to press, commented that he enjoyed the Hawthorne reference but did not in fact know it, adding that I do know the original Monitor, though my immediate stored image is of the pair of th century floating guns that were still in the RN through
WW, Erebus and Terror. They were just single monster gun-turrets that steamed about:Yellow
submarine animations (e-mail to Clive Bush, Jan. ).
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press
and the Newberry Library, ), .
In the order of physical and mathematical complexity there is no question of the sequence of
historic time.Thompson, Growth and Form, .
Klee, Notebooks I, .

clive bush

 Klee, Notebooks I,
Fisher, Interviews through Time, .
Originally Ed Dorns introduction to Lorine Niedeckers My Friend Tree (The Wild Hawthorne
Press, ), reprinted in The Full Note, ed. Peter Dent (Budleigh Salterton: Devon, ), .
Fisher, Interviews through Time, .

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