"Birmingham's what I think with": Roy Fisher's Composite-Epic

The paradoxical fame of British poet Roy Fisher is that he is a "poet's poet," one who remains scandalously neglected by both the reading public and the critical establishment. Indeed, the neglect, according to the Hull poetry magazine Bête Noire, has of late become "an offence against public decency." Yet the tally of critical articles about his work keeps on growing, ¹ and he remains in demand as an interviewee. ² He has always been in print, and always with well-respected presses, and he must be unique in having had a Collected Poems issued by three different presses (Fulcrum in 1968, Oxford University Press in 1980, and Bloodaxe in 1996). If this is neglect, then there must be plenty of contemporary poets who would like a share of it.

The cornerstone of Fisher's fame (or "neglect") is his major urban sequence, City, a poetry-and-prose hybrid evoking his native city of Birmingham, reprinted in its 1961 version in all the Collected Poems. Understandably, this "mini-epic" is the main focus of all general pieces about Fisher's work, and it has a gravitas and an immediately recognizable breadth of significance. For one thing, it is the most powerful literary account we have in poetry of the widespread experience in mid-century Britain of urban loss and destruction, a three-stage process comprising, first, the Blitz during the Second World War, then the wholesale "redevelopment" and "slum clearance" of the 1950s and 1960s, and finally the de-industrialization of the 1970s and 1980s. Notoriously, this sudden obliteration of the past was greater and more sweeping in the midlands city of Birmingham than anywhere else in Britain, and the new cityscape which replaced the old was more brutalist and alienating there than anywhere else. The reaction to such experience is sometimes an almost frantic nostalgia, but it can also result in a desire to research and understand the past, to secure thereby some permanence for it, and some renewed sense of place.

In literary terms, too, we know where City came from. That is to say, we know about its artistic provenance, partly because it has been discussed explicitly by Fisher in interviews and correspondence. In fact, it has a double literary provenance, with roots in both American and European literary treatments of urbanism. ³ But my focal question here is precisely the opposite one: yes, we know where it came from, but where (in terms of Fisher's work as a whole) did it go to? For City is very unlike anything else Fisher has written, since the rest of his output suggests little taste or tolerance for the kind of large-scale, easy-paced, predominantly "scopic" writing that we see in City. Furthermore, the interviews reveal a rather uncomfortable set of circumstances surrounding the work, including the selection and arrangement of the material for publication by somebody else; the subsequent, somewhat inhibiting realization for Fisher that although City wasn't quite the way he wanted it to be, it was nevertheless finding readers; the strong consequent desire to produce something more substantial and more to his own liking in prose; an inability, in the event, to produce this great prose work, and a consequent dissatisfaction with his poetic methods when he returned to them; which events in combination produced a writer's block of several years' duration that seemed to make it impossible to write again, not just in the City way, but in any way which might look like a natural evolution from that of City. Fisher's reader, therefore, has long been compelled to think of City as a large and anomalous "singleton" within the oeuvre. My proposed solution is to see City, not as a free-standing "mini-epic," but as part of what I will call a "composite-epic" spanning the whole of his career to date. My intention is first...