Roy Fisher

Roy Fisher (11 June 1930 – 21 March 2017) was an English poet and jazz pianist.

His poetry shows an openness to both European and American modernist influences, whilst remaining grounded in the experience of living in the English Midlands.

Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his long career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war British poetry.

He has been admired by poets and critics as diverse as Donald Davie, Eric Mottram, Marjorie Perloff, and Sean O’Brien.

Roy Fisher was born in June 1930 at 74 Kentish Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, the home into which his parents had moved in 1919 and where they lived until their deaths.

His mother Emma was 39 at the time of Fisher's birth.

A sister and a brother preceded him.

His father Walter Fisher was a craftsman in the jewellery trade, and the family was ‘poor and prudent’.

His parents had no political or religious affiliations, though his father was a chorister at a local church.

Fisher describes the landscape of his childhood as ‘ugly’, the industrial sprawl of Smethwick to the south of Handsworth a place of danger.

The grimy cityscape, the bomb damage of the war, and the industrial decline of the post-war years, these were important influences on Fisher.

But ‘something called Nature’ was also present early in his life, with excursions into the nearby countryside a regular aspect of family life.

Fisher went to Handsworth Grammar School.

As a teenager he became interested in jazz and taught himself to play the piano.

He was particularly influenced by a group of Chicago musicians including Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, and the pianist Joe Sullivan.

By his late teens he was playing in public with local bands.

In 1948 he went to Birmingham University to read English.

After leaving Keele he continued to work as a writer and jazz musician, a second career he had sustained since the late 1950s playing with a number of his childhood heroes including Bud Freeman and Wild Bill Davison when they were touring Britain.

After graduating and qualifying as a teacher, he taught from 1953 at the grammar school in Newton Abbott, Devon, as part of a team engaged in a radical revision of English teaching methods.

In the same year Fisher married artist Barbara Venables; they were to have two children.

His son Ben was Head of French at University of Bangor, and creator of one of the world's most popular narrow-gauge railway websites; his daughter Sukey is a screenwriter.

In 1954 Fisher had two short poems broadcast on the BBC by Charles Causley, and another published in a small press magazine The Window. The latter caught the eye of the poet Gael Turnbull who was putting together a British issue of the American magazine Origin, edited by Cid Corman, and he asked Fisher to contribute.

Returning to Birmingham in 1957, where he again worked as a jazz musician and began encountering, often late at night, the material that would prompt new poetry and prose, Fisher worked as a specialist Drama teacher in a primary school, moving to Dudley College of Education in 1958.

Fisher's first pamphlet City (1961) was published by Turnbull's Migrant Press.

The assemblage of verse and prose which makes up the text, was compiled from Fisher's notebooks by Michael Shayer, Turnbull's partner at Migrant.

Fisher was dissatisfied with the pamphlet but it ‘caught people’s attention.’

In 1963 he was appointed to Bordesley College of Education in Birmingham as Principal Lecturer and Head of Department of English and Drama.

A second pamphlet, Ten Interiors with Various Figures, was published by Tarasque Press in 1966, a surreal sequence of narrative poems some with quite short lines but many using a very long line close to prose.

That same year Fisher also published The Ships Orchestra with Fulcrum Press, a long prose sequence again showing the influence of surrealism.

In 1971 Fisher moved to Keele University where he taught in the Department of American Studies until 1982.

Fisher moved to Upper Hulme, Staffordshire Moorlands in 1982, and to Earl Sterndale in Derbyshire in 1986.

In 1985 he was divorced from Barbara Venables Fisher, who died in 2007.

In 1987 he married the playwright Joyce Holliday and outlived her by fifteen years.

Fisher and Turnbull became friends, and remained close until Turnbull's death in 2004.

Turnbull introduced Fisher to the work of American modernist poets including William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Louis Zukovsky, as well as to Basil Bunting, whom he met through Turnbull.

Cid Corman also provided poetry tutorials by post.

In these writers Fisher encountered an aesthetic that was serious and demanding.

It was this rather than any stylistic mannerism he took from them.

Publication of Fisher's work during his first ten years as a poet owed a great deal to Turnbull.

He died at home on 21 March 2017, aged 86.