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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

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

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

ing 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 de-

clining 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 appa-

ratus with which he interprets the world.The landscape of Fishers poetry almost al-

ways includes a meditation on the nature of representation itself and the operationsof 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 possibili-

ties which include both the twentieth-century and the contemporary alongside the

legacies of previous centuries. In the two prose stanzas (taken from a longer se-

quence) quoted above, it would be a mistake to see a linear progression of enlight-

enment. 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

c l i v e b u sh

The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume , number (): 107128 by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press


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that has not truly been seen for what it is against a vision of a tempting and too eth-

ically 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 sug-

gests the angel in the puppet.

The ghosts of past visions and ways of seeing haunt Fishers work in a drama thatcompels 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 ei-

ther/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 re-

placed by a new mechanism, fully authenticated by the power of the then-new in-

dustrial revolution. Nature has been transformed by work and thought, and Baude-

laire 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 com-

merce, 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 para-

doxically offered to us as at once ur-reality and diseased reality.The most contem-

porary and sophisticated of commentators still bring with them echoes of the clas-

sical 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 well-

known to the police.

Air-port-style commerce and art are no longer reserved for the shop windows of interna-

tional terminals: the historic center of cities also offers the tired pedestrians airport archi-

tecture, 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

t h e y a l e jo u r na l o f c r i t i c i sm


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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 Pe-

trovka 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 gro-

ceries, 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 chal-

lenges 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 ab-

stracted 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 re-

fute 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 be-

come revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the

Communist Manifesto. For the moment only the surrealists have understood its present com-

mands.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 material-

ism breaks the seal of its substitutions and ends the boredom of precocious equiva-

lents 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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than a fragment of the complex and minutely undue selectivity all that is offered by the ma-

chineand 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 lay-

ing 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,gate-

less, 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 thearistocratic 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 air-

noise 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 al-

lowed to happen, there are ways of seeing, living, and experiencing whose com-plexity 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 un-

folding 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 desti-

nation 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 sug-

gested 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 Eng-lish and American poets of the city have always responded variously to the urban

experience.Whitman had deployed an explosive drama of the coupling and decou-

pling of the self within a panoramic perspective of massified groups to attempt to

overcome the contradictions of the natural representative one and many in En-

lightenment 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 his-

torical 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 tech-

nology 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 democraticjuxtapo-sition 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 na-

tionalist 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 thanin poems these days) is a place where a Conradian Thames grotesquely illuminates

the criminal underworld of the imperialist and post-imperialist city. Sinclairs fasci-

nation 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 techno-

mathematical 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 withWilliam Carlos Williamss similarly painterly sense of the thing seen.Yet Paterson re-

lies 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 re-

vised nationalist perspective) which is entirely absent from Roy Fisher.There is per-

haps 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, Fi-

nancial, 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, alter-

ing 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 cre-

ate an image of it as a site of anomie, ennui, a wasteland of the human spirit. Forreasons 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 rust-

ing sheds, the tarry stinks, and the slimy canals of Smethwick. It was a lonely and gi-

gantic landscape with hardly anybody in it.22

Fishers technique involves suspending conventional judgments, attacking the cul-

tural 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 fun-

damental 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 ap-

propriately 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 soft-

ening 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 seesoakingor softeningor 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, al-

most archaic metaphor of a fog of blood in the water, with its narrative implica-

tions 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 thatquantity replaces quality as the object of the gaze:

The mass of things, indistinguishable one from another, loosing their qualities into the com-

mon 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 necessar-

ily 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 construc-

tion 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 wouldhave 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 distinguish-

ing the midst from the thickness of the world. Here the moon becomes the single



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This vision is close to that of DArcy Thompson, whose capacity to generalize bio-

logical structural morphology across habitual distinctions of appearance was impor-

tant, 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 ap-

proach 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 in-

sect 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 thousandthpart 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, simul-

taneously 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 land-

scapes offered by poetry in its struggle to renew its own language.Yet as Thompsonalso 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 compo-

sition (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 as-

sumption 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? Andwhat 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 contra-

dictory 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 reso-nance of the first apprehension of the words relation to its signifier: thehouse, 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 pre-

posterous 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 cen-

ters 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 be-nign.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 im-

personal 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

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the meadow that is important, rather it is the fact that their predetermined suffer-

ing 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 struc-

tures offered by the anthropologists and others. Fisher examines the affective con-sequences 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 de-

scribed is in contention with what is organized by it, with the two elements com-

peting 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 move-

ment 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 warpinghardly shows in the stations of my path, even the unspiral staircase, but it has many conse-

quences 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 be-

neath 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 denselycharged.Stations suggests stations of the cross, and path has all the traditional

accretions of the poetic way.The unspiral staircase suggests, by negative defini-

tion, 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-



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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 dis-

turbing poem, its roots in any number of key works, not all modernist: Sternes Tris-

tram Shandy, Swifts Gullivers Travels, PoesArthur Gordon Pym, Melvilles ConfidenceMan. 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 psy-

choanalytic approach.The poem presents representations of culturally conditioned

desire and gender behavior in relation to the body, and the poems narrative frag-ments 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 prosefragments 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 sax-

ophonist; the black and dry trombonist,Amy; Dougal,a late British empire sea-

port (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 possibili-

ties of cross-gender, gay-straight,bi-sexual, and ethnic.Various expressionist and sur-

real 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 ap-

proved of by the one married woman.There is a captain who might be a first offi-

cer, a man with an orange for a head, a convalescent woman with whom the narra-

tor-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 ac-

curately captures a self turned in a hostile manner against itself at the moment whentheoretically it has the opportunity to be most fulfilled.

The fragmentary narrative and fragmented characters are only a pretext for con-

structing a dream-like space in which the real world is a ghostly presence. In this di-

ary-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 ma-

chine.38 The main clue to reading the poem comes from Fisher himself:in fact thewhole 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-nine-

teenth century, Fisher operates between the real and imaginary.This is a predeter-

mined 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 situ-

ation 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 medievalship 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 anunturned 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, na-

ture giving a hint of the sardonic hierarchies of power in an almost totally con-

structed 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 determinedby the wood-cut itself, partly by the arts-and-crafts tradition, partly by a deeply vi-

sionary 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 inher-

ited 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, work-

place/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),



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or attempting to summarize the semantic movements or shifts of tempo and at-

mosphere 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 con-

tinuous section which moves from a description of the ship to a kind of me-

dieval dream fantasy.

In a passage that begins where two opposing accounts of the physical ship aregiven, one prefaced by Reasons and the other by Reasoning, Fisher draws a distinc-

tion 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 medita-tive wandering, which connects it to the more general world of industry, city build-

ing, 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 para-

graph 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 ar-rested 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 rak-

ishly over inconsequential forms and looks when the sky is dirty like the chimney of a cre-

matorium 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, suchmechanical magnification of the voice to stridency! Such a channelled street,with iron pave-

ments for her to strut down, so young!

Monitors, those curious warships there used to be. Little vessels that each carried one enor-

mous 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 therebut nobody can ever see them.

Think of Joyces mother.An accordioniste, maybe, toothy, gilded somewhere, and with a hol-

low 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

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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 fin-

gers 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 im-

mobility 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 for-

eign 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.Theblack/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 ef-

fects 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 dy-

namism 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 (whichbears 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 infi-

nite pole of height and depth, with no other motive than my need for them to be



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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 moreconsequence 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 semi-

animate, opening up only to die.The shops on their backs are like dead fish con-

structing an inanimate ocean, their windows with their suggestions of blank up-

turned eyes making for an extravagant metaphor, perceiving the strangest similarityin 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 willgo 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 liber-

ated 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 epi-

thet (the term traditionally associated with the wanderer), as the sea captains au-

thoritylike that of Melvilles monomaniac Captain Ahabis based by inference

on the fear of the acceptance of the sociality of wife and family. Interior and exte-

rior confinements become symbiotic.

The nature of confinement is continued as the perception shifts from line via vol-

ume 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 con-

trasted with circles suggest this paradox of stasis and movement.These are not the

transcendent circles of Emersonian supra-being, but the patterns of structure withinnature 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 spi-

rally, 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 be-

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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 con-

structed 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 iron-

clad, to a walled garden.These successive images are a waking dream indicating dif-ferent 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 var-

ious 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-per-

ceived fragments of the exterior world.The exterior world exists at the edges ofconsciousness, 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 Ameri-

can practice, the interactive and reciprocal presence of bodies, cities, and technolo-

gies, 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 nineteenth-

century 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 forwhat 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 or-

der to write, and its essential qualities never alter. It combines a sense of lyrical re-

moteness 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; NewYork, 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 interviewsand 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, ),

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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 lineationand rhythmic aspects) provided that his own words are kept in mind:I decided that WittgensteinsTractatus was a very splendid sort of stylistic influence for one to adopt, and I paid far more atten-

tion to the Tractatus as a mode of lineation, say, than to any poet.And similarly, in more recentyears, 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] alwayshad to be called prose. Fisher, Interviews through Time,, .

Roy Fisher, The Ships Orchestra (London: Fulcrum Press, ), .All further page references aregiven in the text.

I cheated insofar as I had certain revolving themes which I would feed in when the thing startedto slow down so I had numbers of little themes which kept coming round; but basically I wouldperfect 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 in-

habitants who had no language for where they were:Have you seen these car-washes with gi-gantic 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 severaltaxis.The Birmingham Posthas 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 prioriideological positions.His Englishness makes him suspi-

cious of writing whose ideology is given in advance, and his non-Englishness once led him to de-clare 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 re-

lations 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 lookedlike a gigantic rat-trap. It was ugly, questionable, suspicious, evidently mischievousnay I will al-

low myself to call it devilish; for this was the new war fiend, destined, along with others of thesame breed, to annihilate whole navies and batter down old supremacies. Nathaniel Hawthorne,

Chiefly about War-Matters, by a Peaceable Man,Atlantic Monthly (JulyDec. ):. RoyFisher, who saw this essay before it went to press, commented that he enjoyed the Hawthorne ref-

erence but did not in fact know it, adding that I do know the original Monitor, though my im-mediate 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:Yellowsubmarine animations (e-mail to Clive Bush, Jan. ).

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale(Evanston and Chicago:Northwestern University Pressand the Newberry Library, ), .

In the order of physical and mathematical complexity there is no question of the sequence ofhistoric time.Thompson, Growth and Form, .

Klee, Notebooks I, .

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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, .


bush appearance

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