Roy Fisher
Poet whose work was much influenced by his love of jazz and childhood in wartime Birmingham
ROY FISHER, who has died aged 86, was a poet and jazz pianist whose writing went neglected and was out of print for much of his life, but whose devoted admirers were eventually able to persuade readers of his importance.
By the time Fisher was 80, the fellow poet Ian McMillan hailed him as “the greatest living English poet” and chose his collected poems, The Long and the Short of It (2005) as his book on Desert Island Discs. That volume also won an encomium from August Kleinzahler, a tricky but chic American poet whose intense enthusiasm for Fisher gave the retired university lecturer a new kind of kudos.
Fisher’s early work appeared in pamphlet form, in print runs from between 50 and 250 copies. At this stage he was not courting a wide audience: for a start, his work showed the influence of American poets, and not always the most accessible ones – he admired the “Black Mountain” school of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.
A large public did not suit him. When he first discovered that his poems were being read by more than a few like-minded souls, he became blocked. (One critic, Simon Jarvis, has identified blockage, both metaphorical and literal, as a motif in his work.)
Even so, Fisher and readers reached an accommodation with each other. This is not to say that Fisher made compromises in his style, but his audience grew as his larger works, sometimes written as prose streams of consciousness, seemed less forbidding; and he also became less afraid of writing.
His readings, too, sometimes in partnership with the jovial McMillan, endeared him to a wider public. His calm voice suggested that he was willing to explain his thoughts, rather than dazzle with difficulty.
He was more pragmatic about audiences in his other life as a jazz pianist. Several commentators, notably Kleinzahler, have picked up on the jazz-like nature of his poetry. “The Thing about Joe Sullivan” is perhaps the most revealing, in which the imaginary pianist Sullivan “won’t swing / like all the others; disregards mere continuity, the snakecharming business …”
Although Fisher’s opinions of his playing had a becoming modesty, there was the same keenness to surprise a listener: “There’s a basic artisan level in playing a tune in time and in the right key without failing, without scaling the impossible. But at the same time you’re always pitching yourself against something – you’ve got to invent. So I like that combination.”
It is this dimension of his poetry that led Kleinzahler to write, “It’s best not to get too comfortable as you progress through a poem because you’re not going to be where you think you are for long.”
Or, as Fisher himself wrote of that imaginary pianist, “fingers following his / through figures that sound obvious / find corners everywhere, / marks of invention, wakefulness …” But other reflections on music hint at how basic the “artisan level” can be: “You walk in, and you try to persuade the people to let you get out alive and pay you. I love this.”
In time, his poetry, too, would develop this sense of perspective, and some pieces are out-and-out jibes at the factionalism that divides poets. In one sequence, he imagines the country split between those who take King Zog of Albania to be their spiritual guide, and those who adhere to “The Real Ian”. The real Ian, it turns out, isn’t really Ian, but “a part-time polytechnic lecturer / called Trevor Hennessey.” It is tempting to see Fisher himself as an Ianist, but the temptation is worth resisting: he is just as quick to deflate the academic world.
Roy Fisher was born in Handsworth on June 11 1930. His father Walter was a craftsman jeweller, as generations before him had been and his mother Emma (née Jones) was from a family of professional gardeners. Fisher grew up in Birmingham, where he lived through the horrors of the Blitz – he lost family members, and revisited his memories of it in his poetry.
He described himself as inattentive at school, and was punished for being left-handed. But he attended Handsworth Grammar School as a scholar, and went up to Birmingham University to read English.
His earliest influence was Dylan Thomas. He was drawn to Thomas’s “apocalyptic” style of writing, and Fisher’s most defining poems show a similar willingness to engage with big themes, such as what an urban landscape can reveal about its ancient roots. But it was American poetry, with its openness of form, that was to have the most lasting impact on him.
Like American poets, and unlike most British poets at the time, he attached himself to institutions. He taught in a grammar school in Devon, alongside his first wife, and on returning to Birmingham, worked as Head of English and Drama at Bordesley College of Education (a teacher training college).
This was when he began to moonlight as a pianist, in styles ranging from trad jazz to bebop, and in venues ranging from village halls to strip clubs. “For a while,” he recalled, “I was the token white in the Andy Hamilton Caribbean Combo.”
He left Bordesley in 1971, to join the American Studies department at Keele, where he served as Senior Lecturer until 1982. Meanwhile he moved from one poetry press to the next, as imprints regularly folded. The long poem with which he most clearly arrived, City, appeared in 1961, from Migrant Press. Although Birmingham is its subject, the name does not appear in the work.
He later said that the Midlands is “supposed to be nowhere at all”, and laughed off the idea of being a “provincial poet”, pointing out that “the provinces” meant everywhere apart from London, Oxford, Cambridge “and one or two rather well-to-do spots around that way”. He himself spent his later years in the village of Earl Sterndale in Derbyshire.
His place defined him, though, and he would assert that “Birmingham’s what I think with”. Later work thrums with the city’s “psychogeography”, not least A Furnace (1986). This volume was published by Oxford University Press, which soon afterwards stopped publishing poetry. However, by this stage, Fisher’s fortunes were changing, and he had found a more permanent home at Bloodaxe. Their publication of The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 was a breakthrough in establishing his reputation.
He did all he could to arrange the poems in that book in such a way as to conceal any sense of his development. “These poems no more amount to a biography than I do,” he wrote. Some autobiographical notes do surface in his work, though, beyond references to lecturing and piano playing.
Especially poignant are the recollections of the Blitz, and also “On Hearing I’d Outlived My Son the Linguist”. The latter offers an insight into his own technique, and his ear for the understated but shattering cadence: “hour by hour today with no whole word all / the emptied patterns of your talk come crowding / into my brain for shelter: / bustling, warm, exact. You’d be interested.”
He married, first, in 1953, Barbara Venables, an artist, with whom he had two children (his son Ben predeceasing him); the marriage was dissolved in 1985. In 1987 he married, secondly, the playwright Joyce Holliday, who predeceased him. He is survived by his daughter, Sukey.