Alan's posting in respect of Roy Fisher struck a curiously dissonant and
simultaneously consonant chord with me.
As a paid-up member of the 'persons from birmingham' society (the price of
admission is a life-long accent) I have a certain immediacy of concern
here - Fisher's work I first encountered in my early twenties and I found it
both excited and disappointed. I don't quite see him as a kind of wannabe
Larkin with a Birmingham accent, but he does share Larkin's minor key,
altho' not Larkin's self-indulgencies of pity-me and bad, bad it all is (but
without a Brummie accent, at least on the one occasion I've been in the same
room as him - N.B. always be ginger about a Brummie who doesn't have the
accent) I'm very keen to see writers engage that fair city (there's a
curious side-tradition of literati with strong Birmingham connections
disowning the place with silence, as if their families didn't come from
there - Auden and Bruce Chatwin for instance - good lord - wasn't Kenneth
Tynan one too?). Now B'ham is a big, loud, tasteless, ugly,
shaggy-dog-haired, sweeping-gestured, warm, shoddy, in-your-face kind of
place that has a great name for provinciality but secretly keeps all kinds
of unexpecteds: Hobbits lurk about its boundaries, Arden parishes are
smothered in its suburbs, Gerontius first dreamt in public in its Town Hall,
the Football League twelved out of it along while it mainsprung Brittania's
industrial ascent to the first global economy. I loathe the place. I refuse
to go back there. And feel only there in the world truly at home. Whatever
that North Warwickshire village gone gargantuan is, it is not I think as
grey-neutral as Fisher's work portrays - that 'City' of his seems mediated
thro' others concepts of the urban. His language, to me, tho' not quite as
flat as Alan feels, doesn't quite 'take off' - I think the nearest to it is
'Seven Attempted Moves' which is a really effective work. He certainly was
unjustly neglected in some quarters, but .....
But I would rather that we 'have' Fisher's work than if we did not, there's
an artistic integrity, a modesty that comes with ability there.
Enough said
david
p.s. - he doesn't understand the meaning of I Ching readings.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Halsey" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, April 09, 2000 4:01 AM
Subject: accepted opinions
> A couple of years, on and off, on this mailbase make me aware of various
> generally accepted opinions of regular correspondents. One is admiration
> for J.H. Prynne's work. I share this, although I'm sympathetic to those
> who sometimes express frustration with it. At least, though, opinions on
> both sides are expressed and argued over. But I've never seen similar
> counter-arguments voiced about Roy Fisher. Bill Herbert's latest post re
> Edwin Morgan (a very cogent expression, I thought, of one poet's
> admiration for another) made me think about this again. Is Roy Fisher's
> work unassailable hereabouts? I've never seen anyone on this list vent a
> critical view of it. But he seems to me a competent yet rather dull
> poet, a wannabe Larkin with a Birmingham accent, the author of a worthy
> but unexciting corpus bulked up with post-objectivist credentials.
> Cripes, am I saying something really very awful?
>
> AH
>
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|