Superimpositions the Poetic Terrain Vague of Roy Fisher’S a Furnace

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Superimpositions The Poetic terrain vague of Roy Fisher’s A Furnace

This essay reads Roy Fisher’s major long poem A Furnace as an expression of post-industrial urban space and an engagement with its episte- mological, political and ethical challenges. Via its central procedure of superimposition, the text develops a spatial poetics that focusses on the dynamic constitution of space. It approaches the wider Birmingham area first through a problematization of perception, then through superim- posing topographically, historically and ontologically different spaces, and eventually culminates in a micro-physical analysis of spatial materi- alization. In presenting different ways of relating to space, the poem gives expression to a fundamentally relational notion of space. This spatial poetics, however, not only refers to the representation of space and forms of conceptualizing space, it also creates space as a particular textual space and as a text that (re)configures and (re)forms the spaces it refers to. It makes these spaces available for cultural re-appropriations and turns the topographical space into a textual terrain vague, an intermediate space for imaginative poetic encounters and re-inscriptions.

Placings and the Critical Zone of the Urban

When in 1996 Roy Fisher, after a period of one and a half decades with Ox- ford UP, published a collection of new and selected poems, The Dow Low Drop, with Bloodaxe Books, the blurb “drew attention to the scattered and discon- tinuous nature of the poet’s actual and possible readership”.1 Although being highly praised by poets and critics alike and being considered one of the most

1 Peter Robinson, “Introduction”, in: Peter Kerrigan / Peter Robinson (eds.), The Thing about Roy Fisher. Critical Studies, Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2000, pp. 1–15, here p. 6.

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influential contemporary English poets, Fisher was still not widely known (nor did he particularly seek to be). Even having been published by the consecrating Oxford UP and being included in the Poetry Book Society Choice (The Thing About Joe Sullivan) and Poetry Book Society Special Commendation (Slakki: New & Neglected Poems) has not notably altered this situation. As William Wootten pointedly formulated the already topic problem of appreciation in his review of The Long and the Short of It in 2005, “Fisher’s long been the most appreciated under-appreciated poet we have”.2 One of the reasons for this can be deduced by applying the blurb’s characterization of Fisher’s readership to his poetic production and his poetics: “With its many varieties of style and tone, Fisher’s work has seemed so inconveniently hard to place.”3 Forming part of the British Poetry Revival in the 1960s and 70s, Fisher went against Movement orthodoxy and its ironic stance that centred on a clearly delimited identity of the speaking subject and gave expression to a markedly English conscious- ness.4 Instead, he programmatically re-visited European modernism and the (historical) avant-garde through the prism of mid-century American poetry, in particular the Black Mountain poets to which he had been introduced by fellow poet Gael Turnbull. This is where the Bloodaxe blurb’s focus on the scattered and discontinu- ous nature of Fisher’s readership gains poetological resonance in two different, but interconnected ways that both have to do with Fisher’s and other Poetry Revival’s poets’ – such as Alan Fisher, Iain Sinclair, J.H. Prynne or Peter Riley – attention to, and rethinking of, space and place. On the one hand, the very name of Bloodaxe is indicative, remitting us to the mythic Anglo-Saxon king at the centre of Basil Bunting’s late-modernist long poem Briggflatts that turned into the foundational text for the revival of the modernist tradition. Bunting’s text offered an influential model not only for the form of the long poem, but for an archaeological approach to place and non-urban, peripheral space that was complemented by the spatially-oriented poetics of the Black Mountain poets and their wider circles. Charles Olson’s field poetics, in particular, introduced a way of combining the modernist focus on perceptual processes and energies with the dynamic spacing of the poem itself, while William Carlos Williams’s

2 William Wootten, “The Measure of the Muse. Review of The Long and the Short of It: Po- ems 1955–2005 by Roy Fisher”, in: Guardian 29.10.2005, www.theguardian.com/books/2005/ oct/29/featuresreviews.guardianreview34 (last accessed: 30.4.2017). 3 Robinson, “Introduction” (see note 1), p. 6. 4 For the British Poetry Revival’s reaction to the omnipresent poetry of the Movement and Fisher’s position within this new poetics see Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying. British Poetry and its Discontents 1950–2000, Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2005, pp. 35–76.

poetica 49 (2017/2018) 114-162