The idea for this thread corresponds to some thoughts I've been having
recently about the poets I'm researching. David and Alison's posts also
provoked some thoughts on my own writing practice.
I've been looking at the work of Roy Fisher, John Ash, Peter Didsbury and
others, in terms of an approach to language which is also an approach to
place. As an epigraph to 'The Butchers of Hull,' Didsbury quoted Carlos
Williams saying 'To what shall the mind turn for that with which to
rehabilitate our thought and our lives? To the word, a meaning hardly
distinguishable from that of place, in whose great virtuous and at present
little realised potency we hereby manifest our belief.'
A place is also a language; or perhaps more liberatingly, an approach to
place is also an approach to language. For example, Fisher's chosen 'place'
is Birmingham, but the approach has proved a liberating example for Ash and
Didsbury in their exploration of other places. Fisher's approach might be
sensed in the lines from 'Wonders of Obligation:'

The things we make up out of language
turn into common property.

Thus in language we may occupy a place which is collectively owned, and the
political implications of this are evident in remarks made by Fisher in a
recent interview with John Tranter in Jacket magazine, talking about 'A
Furnace:'

... it's an attempt to place my understanding of how the civilisation I was
brought up in, which is working class life in a large industrial city which
has been invented for people who are not most of the people who live in
those cities - an examination of that whole cultural era, that historical
era, the two hundred years or so which brought heavy industry, which
invented the heavy industrial city.

In whose interests has our landscape been invented? The landscape of heavy
industry, the landscape of the Heritage industry which builds an elaborate
fiction of a 'British' past, the more recent landscape of
leisure/business/science parks: all these landscapes come with a language
and a politics of ownership. The real and imagined places written into
language in poems like 'The Rain' (John Ash, including the lines 'We have
to love the past / it is our invention') and 'Back of the House' (Peter
Didsbury) are imaginative responses to our need for common property in the
face of private interests competing over Britain. This requires a 'common
language,' a playful, improvisatory and sometimes discursive mode which
seems less drawn to syntactic dislocation and more towards a kind of lyric
openness recalling the New York School, or what John Gery referred to as
'Ashbery's fundamentally egalitarian impulse.'
These ideas are still bouncing around half-formed in my head, but I'd be
interested to hear responses to them - please be merciful!

As for my own sense of place, I tend to think that the places I've lived
almost cancel each other out. Born in Aberdeen the son of one English one
Scottish parent, I moved to Cambridge when still very young, and then to
Manchester four or five years ago. Apart from being university cities,
these seem to have little in common with one another. I'm fascinated by the
industrial landscape of Manchester and the language with which it confronts
you, often in the shape of the huge words written in white on red brick on
warehouse towers. To grow up in Cambridge was to come to take for granted
buildings with an enormous and overbearing history, of which I'm sure many
(including myself) remain relatively innocent, like the inhabitants of
Leicester. Aberdeen for me is a myth of belonging I constructed as a child,
all shining granite and the deep blue of the North Sea. But in writing,
I've come to question all notions of belonging: as the first part of this
post indicates, language is the most important home I can think of. Feeling
English in Scotland and Scottish in England means that my attitude to
nationality is equally sceptical. I taught in a school in Lyon for a year,
and talked to many pupils of North African background who felt this
contrast more fiercely than I ever had cause to, feeling Tunisian or
Algerian in France but European when they visited family in North Africa:
French rap music is the expression of this hybrid community, and a source
of inspiration to me. Once again, it's in the practice of language that we
construct our place or our location.
Apologes for the hugeness of this post: I hope it's of some interest,

best,

Malcolm Phillips




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