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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease Swipe Right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill Life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal Wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix Prose Poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter Robinson -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Ruinad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Citizen Fisher.
A Fortnightly Review.
Roy Fisher: The Citizen and the Making of City
edited by Peter Robinson
Bloodaxe 2022 | 286 pages | £14.99 $24.00
By SIMON COLLINGS.
ROY FISHER PUBLISHED his first book of poetry, City, with Migrant Press in 1961. Michael Shayer, one of the partners at Migrant, selected and arranged the material, a collage of verse and poetic prose. The poems were finished pieces Fisher had ‘lying around’, the prose passages extracts from a work in progress, which the poet described in a letter to Gael Turnbull as: ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called The Citizen.’
This prose work was long believed to have been lost, until Fisher’s literary executor, Peter Robinson, discovered among the poet’s papers a mutilated blue hard-bound notebook dated ‘November 1959’ entitled ‘The Citizen’.1 This and several other documents in the Fisher archive shed new light on the origins of City, and its later evolution. Roy Fisher: The Citizen and the Making of City, published by Bloodaxe, brings together these various texts with an introduction by Robinson, who is the leading authority on Fisher’s work.
The content of the 1959 notebook makes for fascinating reading. What survives of ‘The Citizen’ manuscript includes many crossings out, revisions and margin notes (which are not reproduced in the Bloodaxe volume) written at different times over a number of years. Fisher went back to this manuscript on several occasions, plundering it for useable material. In the letter to Turnbull mentioned above, Fisher described the notebook as ‘a mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography. I’m doing all this so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.’
I am privileged to have had a small role in the genesis of The Citizen and the Making of City, as I transcribed the text of the notebook which makes up pages 37 to 129 of the Bloodaxe volume. This gave me access to the marginalia, which deserve an essay in their own right. Some record the poet’s evaluation of the literary quality of its various sections, positive and negative, the need for revision, or the potential of a passage to work as a standalone poem. Other comments provide insights into Fisher’s thought processes at the time. In one place the poet has written: ‘Personal. Withdraw – no it may stand. It is necessary here.’ In another he remarks: ‘Bio. That repeated transaction with the Mother through my 20s.’ These kinds of observations are part of the ‘taking a look at myself’ he mentioned to Turnbull.
In 1960, in a separate notebook, Fisher made two journal entries concerning the ‘The Citizen’, in which he indicated that he wanted the dominant tone to be ‘the physical presence of the city’.2 That meant avoiding saying too much about the narrator and main protagonist. One of the observations reads: ‘Erase all possibility of an explanation of everything in the light of the narrator’s Freudian condition.’ A few lines further on he writes: ‘Don’t pander to curiosity about this.’
‘The Citizen’ was never completed, but Fisher maintained the ambition of creating a text in which the city itself was the central character. This informed his reworking of City after its initial publication by Migrant. The poet was grateful to Shayer for organising and publishing the work, forcing him ‘through the hoop’, but at the same time, as he explained in a letter to Turnbull, he felt the pamphlet distorted what he had been ‘trying to do with the urban material’. Turnbull suggested adding more prose, and Fisher went along with the advice, extracting further material from ‘The Citizen’ which Migrant published as Then Hallucinations: City II in 1962.
Still dissatisfied, Fisher went on to compile a typescript combining elements of the two Migrant Press publications, omitting some poems and adding others. He also revised some of the prose. This re-working became the basis for the definitive version of City included in the 1969 Collected Poems published by Fulcrum Press. The overall style and tone of the work in its final version is markedly more consistent than the original. Some elements of Then Hallucinations were cut (to be reused in a standalone prose poem called ‘Hallucinations’), the city itself was made central, and the figure of the narrator integrated into this revised schema. It was in this form that City came to be recognised as Fisher’s signature work.
Commenting on the positioning of the narrator in this final version, Robinson writes in his introduction: ‘The necessary point of arrival in the revision is then provided by the I-directed prose passages that lead towards the definitive work’s close. The experiences of the city differently presented in the various versions of its anthological assemblage, have, however much Fisher might have temperamentally resisted it, a subject figure by which they can be registered and within which they may be understood as forming a problem or predicament.’
Pointing to the cultural and political critique implicit in the work, Robinson says: ‘Read aright, City can tell us a great deal about the emergence of the kinds of half-modernised, and half-ruined, hybridised, collaged, richly poor urban environments in which so many British people were, and still are obliged to thrive or survive.’
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click ‘full screen’ option. ‘Esc’ returns you here.
The story of the making of City is absorbing. Equally interesting is the material in ‘The Citizen’ which Fisher left unpublished. One major thread running through this text is concerned with sex and sexual anxiety. In section 4 the narrator describes himself as ‘miserable to learn of any performance of the sexual act.’ There are accounts of the activities of ‘prostitutes’, including of ‘a little mousey woman’ who having been unsuccessful in finding a customer at a pub sets off down the street (section 24). She’s spotted by a man ‘of about forty in a loose raincoat’ whose face is ‘seriously malformed…the lower jaw protruding lopsidedly, with the teeth resting on the upper lips’. He pursues the ‘tiny bird-like’ sex-worker and tries to engage her but is repulsed and left ‘stricken and blank’. The scene is grotesquely comic.
In the margin next to this passage Fisher has written: ‘This is terrible, in its values as well as its narrative. But it’s true. True voyeur. The horror-freak-stuff is worst. But the point of view needs doing; and my own part as real voyeur. Everybody’s a voyeur at this time.’
Later in ‘The Citizen’ there’s a long dream-like sequence, in which the narrator walks down a steeply sloping alley between high walls beside a railway viaduct (section 35). On either side of him a succession of women appear out of the darkness, young women he knows socially, silent apparitions, ‘benign spirits’. These phantoms disappear as he descends further and is joined by ‘two middle-aged harlots’, one on either side. He recognises them as women he has often observed, and comments that of all the ‘whores’ in town this pair recognise what drew him ‘day after day, to watch them at work’, namely that they ‘despise the sexual act’. The narrator then begins to morph into a ‘middle-aged prostitute’ himself, something he once fantasised about as a schoolboy. ‘They are taking me where I shall be freed from sexuality,’ he says.
At the start of this passage Fisher has written: ‘Run the shit detector through. It’s a scene of Test & needs to be honoured however clumsy it is. Fellini’s problem.’ At the point where the apparitions of the girls occur he’s written ‘So Giulietta’, presumably a reference to Fellini’s wife, the actor Giulietta Masina. The parade of young women is reminiscent of scenes in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) in which Masina plays a trusting and naïve sex-worker searching for love, who is betrayed by a succession of men.
Fisher’s journal entries about the ‘Citizen’ project include a number of references to relationships with women:
The ambition here appears to have been to treat these issues in a symbolic, even mythic form. The final note refers to exploring territory similar to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake but with a ‘different conclusion’.
Further evidence of Fisher’s preoccupation with matters of sex is offered by the second Migrant pamphlet Then Hallucinations which ends with a reference to Duchamp’s The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. The text reads: ‘This city is like the Bride of Marcel Duchamp; and when she is stripped the Glass needs to be broken and carted away.’ This sentence does not appear in ‘The Citizen’ but there is a poem of Fisher’s, from this period, called ‘The Bachelors Stripped Bare by Their Bride’.3 In the poem A, B, and C are asking D (Duchamp) to explain the work, which D declines to do, offering instead the comment:
Duchamp saw his Large Glass as a grotesque comedy of sex, the bride trapped in the upper section of the work, her suitors part of a mechanical contrivance in the lower portion.
This sexual aspect of ‘The Citizen’ does find a place in City, especially in the passage which begins ‘Yet whenever I am forced to realise…’ (p.178, original City). This section survives, in a truncated form, through to the revised version (see p.249). The passage includes the text:
The voyeurism of ‘The Citizen’, which Fisher comments on in his marginalia, is much softened in City, the poet retaining only passages which have a more resolved, upbeat tone. Toward the end of the revised version of City we read: ‘I have often felt myself to be vicious, in living so much by the eye, yet among so many people […] Yet I can see no sadism in the way I see them now.’ (p.253)
The Citizen and the Making of City adds significantly to the growing body of material on Roy Fisher’s poetry in which Peter Robinson has been a major presence. It is to be hoped that the opening of the archive at Sheffield University will encourage more scholars to engage critically with Fisher’s work.
♦
SIMON COLLINGS lives in Oxford and has published poems, stories and critical essays in a range of journals including Stride, Journal of Poetics Research, Café Irreal, Tears in the Fence, Ink Sweat and Tears, Lighthouse and PN Review. Out West, his first chapbook, was published by Albion Beatnik in 2017, and a second chapbook, Stella Unframed, was released by The Red Ceilings Press in 2018. He is a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review. His collection of short fictions, Why Are You Here?was published by our imprint, Odd Volumes, in November 2020. An archive of his work for the Fortnightly is here.
NOTES
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Publication: Monday, 2 May 2022, at 14:53.
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