Preface 

Had he lived, Roy Fisher (1930-2017) would have turned ninety in June 2020, when an exhibition to be entitled Most of It Has Never Been Seen, containing a selection from the contents of his archive, was planned to open in the foyer at the Western Bank Library, University of Sheffield. As a part of these celebrations, doomed not to take place by the global pandemic’s onset in the February of that year, Adam Piette and I invited contributions from poets to a homage volume which we expected to be published as a chapbook and made available at the exhibition, as well as at a conference and series of poetry events planned for the months that the exhibition would run. By the time those best laid plans began to unravel, we had collected all the publication’s contents and had entitled our chapbook The Worked Object: Poems in Memory if Roy Fisher.

   Its publication here as a Roy Fisher supplement to the Summer 2024 issue of Blackbox Manifold helps explain why several of the poems offered four years ago now appear with an acknowledgement of prior publication, and why the poem generously contributed by Paul Muldoon, entitled ‘The Ice Fishers’ and published in Howdie-Skelp (2021) by his British and American publishers, is not included among them. It can be read on page 104 of that publication. We are grateful to all the poets published here for granting a renewed permission to print their poems in this format, and particularly to Geraldine Monk and Frances Presley for also agreeing to the printing of the poems contributed by Alan Halsey (1949-2022) and Gavin Selerie (1949-2023) respectively. We would like to remember them both in this memorial publication.

   If Roy Fisher is that equivocal thing, a poet’s poet, he may be among the very few cherished by such a wide range of writers. Back when he celebrated his seventieth birthday, Robert Sheppard and I coedited News for the Ear which along with uncollected pieces in both poetry and prose by its object of homage, featured work by, among many others, Thom Gunn, Lee Harwood, Elaine Feinstein, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O’Brien, Maurice Scully, Peter Riley, Charles Tomlinson and Gael Turnbull. Of the writers gathered there, many unfortunately no longer with us, it is a particular pleasure to be including work here by both Fleur Adcock and August Kleinzahler, staunch friends and supporters of Roy Fisher down the years.

  Perhaps it is worth asking if there is something peculiar to Fisher’s work that has made him so broadly admired by both his contemporaries and now several generations of his juniors. In the fifth of the ‘Seven Attempted Moves’ a mysterious character, the only one so distinguishable in the poem, is reported as stealing four schoolroom chairs. Evoked as ‘this souvenir hunter / with his respect for neither side – / Just for things happening’, he then disappears from the scene. This perhaps catches something of the simultaneous commitment and detachment that characterises Fisher’s way of conducting himself through what in ‘Sets’ he calls ‘a civilisation: or just / the dirtiest brawl you ever saw’. His allegiances are never in doubt, as when in ‘3rd November 1976’ – which faced ‘Sets’ in The Thing About Joe Sullivan (1978) – he describes ‘twenty of us’ who are ‘talking / about the Arts Council of Great Britain / and its beliefs about itself. We’re baffled.’ Yet his way of holding to those firm allegiances is curious, sceptical, and non-partisan.

   Similarly, in his own poetry he allowed himself an unusually wide range of procedural possibilities, from the most straight-talking of epigrams and satires to syntactically challenged and challenging aleatory assemblages. He was also an enthusiastic collaborator with visual artists and, necessary for a jazz piano accompanist, respected others’ musical abilities. In a Tuesday 4 February 1958 Birmingham Mail interview, Fisher remarked that it ‘is worthless trying to play jazz if you have nothing to say. The same applies to poetry.’ What Fisher had to say he said like a musician through improvising on the forms that he could make available and in so doing showed a great many others how to find what they might have to say for themselves. The poems gathered here pay tribute to that distinctiveness and the generosity towards others which its modes and methods implied.

   Now that after four difficult years, the Roy Fisher Archive at the University of Sheffield will be opened for consultation, an opening celebrated with the delayed exhibition of its selected contents in the second half of 2024, it is a pleasure to be able to make these poems available on the Blackbox Manifold site and I’m grateful to Alex Houen and Adam Piette for hosting it here. The Worked Object: Poems in Memory of Roy Fisher is an affirmation of this writer’s continuing importance for contemporary poetry. We hope you enjoy what its contents have to offer of warmth, engagement, and celebration.

Peter Robinson, July 2024

Peter Robinson has published aphorisms, prose poems, short stories, fiction and literary criticism. For some of his poetry and translations he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Recent publications include Retrieved Attachments (Reading: Two Rivers Press, 2023) and, with Roberta Antognini, the Collected Poems of Giorgio Bassani (New York: Agincourt Press, 2023).

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