Our city, my city and Roy Fisher’s ‘City’
How Birmingham possessed a poet
Good morning Patchers — The late Roy Fisher was a teacher, a jazz pianist and “one of the best poets of his somewhat unsung generation”, writes fellow bard Luke Kennard in today’s essay. Fisher’s work is deeply connected with Birmingham. The poet Neil Leadbeater even described the city’s affect on Fisher as though he were “being possessed by it” and his work as a way of “exorcising” it from his mind. Luke explores this relationship while reflecting on Birmingham’s influence on his own life and work — it’s a cracking read.
Editor’s note: Today’s article isn’t the kind of thing you’ll be able to read in other local publications. That’s because much of the media is more interested in making money from advertising than it is in publishing intelligent and thought-provoking writing. We want to change that and need as many members as possible to pay journalists, editors and photographers, to keep bringing you quality reading material. As such, you’ll need to be a member to read the article in full — we hope you’ll join us.
Brum in brief
🌩️Surprise storm: A house in Sheldon was struck by lightening yesterday as part of brief storms that sideswept the West Midlands. Five people were checked by parademics and and two properties caught fire, one in Sheldon and another in Dudley. A lightning strike also damaged a signalling system disrupting services between Worcestor and Birmingham New Street. Full story.
🏗️‘Perverse’ tower plans: Plans for a 37-storey skyscraper, which one councillor called “perverse”, have been approved despite concerns over affordable housing and the impact on surrounding historic buildings. The Moda-designed tower, on the vacant No. 1 Duchess Place site, will include 462 apartments, meeting rooms and gyms and will be the tallest in the area. It forms part of the New Garden Square masterplan, near the Hagley Rd, which is tipped to host 2,000 homes. Full story here and here.
📝The future of Solihull: The council is asking residents for their say on redeveloping Mell Square, a critical part of Solihull town centre. Proposals to turn it into a public space with leisure facilities and new homes are part of a new development masterplan. The project is in collaboration with property developers Muse, whose Midlands director Maggie Grogan said: “Involving the community is critical to our approach to ensure that we reflect the future needs of Solihull’s residents and businesses.” You can have your say here.
🕺After hours: After venting my frustration about the dearth of clubbing options in Birmingham in this recent article, it was a pleasure to stumble across a new evening hosted by Anjuna Lounge (a brilliant coffee shop and events space in Stirchley) with the Hare & Hounds. They’re hosting a house and alternative music evening this Friday at 9 pm. If the background music in the coffee shop is anything to go by, it should be top notch. Tickets are a very fair fiver, too.
Our City, My City and Roy Fisher’s ‘City’
By Luke Kennard
Are you a local writer, or a writer who just happens to live somewhere? A writer of place, or a writer who has merely ended up in a place? And does this materially alter the way you write, your go-to subjects and obsessions?
Birmingham Is What I Think With, Tom Pickard’s 1991 documentary about the poet Roy Fisher, takes its title from one of the writer’s poems of the same name, which explores the city’s industrial foundations and brutal, shambolic yet functional charm. “This isn’t Paris…” the poem begins. As a phrase, Birmingham Is What I Think With captures both Fisher’s profound connection to Birmingham and the way he could never quite escape it: your own brain as a kind of sentient metropolis, the map and the territory, the possibility of getting lost in it.
Born in Handsworth in 1930, Fisher was a jazz pianist, a teacher, a bold and experimental writer, and one of the best poets of his somewhat unsung generation. I first read him at the age of 19, in the poetry section of Exeter University library, and felt as though I’d found a secret path between the refined experiments of the Modernists and something more immediate, more public. This was an erudite and affable sensibility guiding you through some complex and multifaceted places and thoughts; poetry that made places and thoughts feel synonymous, and forced you to pay more attention to your own. To paraphrase John Ash, another British poet I was reading at the time: poetry should be difficult, but perhaps it should be more difficult for the poet than the reader.
Roy Fisher’s work was one of the reasons I was excited to move to Birmingham to take up a lecturing job 16 years ago. If there was any cultural justice, there would be a statue of him in our city, or some kind of civic recognition of his importance — even if such a nod from the establishment would run contra to his very being as an artist.
Fisher was the youngest of three siblings; his father worked in the Jewellery Quarter as a craftsman and the family grew up fairly poor in a war-damaged and industrial part of town. There may be academic and cultural opportunities granted by a grammar school education which still pertain today, but becoming a world-renowned poet wasn’t necessarily one of them in the 20th century. Far from a laureate, Fisher wasn’t even the kind of writer to accept a creative writing post at a university, or a writer-in-residence or editorial position. He was completely dedicated to his craft, modest about his genius, and equally committed to his day job teaching drama in primary and secondary schools. (In fact, a lot of people like this work as teachers and the cultural world would completely collapse without them; I know I’d never have carried on writing without their influence).
Fisher started publishing in the late 1950s and died aged 86 in 2017, after the publication of Slakki: New & Neglected Poems, and the first American edition of his work. I’m glad that he got to see that. “City”, his first and most celebrated work, was initially published as a pamphlet in 1959, with the definitive edition coming later in 1969. It is a wonderful connected sequence of individual poems, a combination of verse and prose poetry, compared in its time to Eliot’s The Waste Land, Pound’s Cantos, and Joyce’s Ulysses (perhaps it doesn’t enjoy the same reputation today, but this can perhaps be put down to Fisher’s refusal to court publicity — it is long overdue a broader audience).
What we get in “City” is a patchwork, as varied and rough around the edges as Birmingham itself. It’s a record of, and for, all of us who have to make our lives in the shabby conurbations of our ever-underfunded country, the streets and common areas where we survive or prosper or negotiate our personal disasters. It’s never preachy, or less than compelling — it makes you a passenger to an eccentric and intelligent mind that could make a park bench interesting. When Fisher wrote the poem, Birmingham “was still very much what it had been when my father was a boy: the old hierarchical industrial buildup had been halted in the moment of rapid modernisation by the war,” he told Jacket Magazine’s John Kerrigan in 2008. “I knew at that time that I couldn’t go so far as to assume any common ground with anybody else for the way I saw things, though I might, with luck, chance upon it. So I wrote accordingly.”
The question that perennially dogs poetry, as an art and a vocation, is of who one is even writing for. As many people as possible, you’d hope — but this gets complicated when you’re not telling people what they want to hear. It’s hard to define exactly what poetry is, but one thing it certainly isn’t is propaganda. “City” doesn’t set out to make Birmingham look good, but to make it feel real. The purpose of poetry is to tell the truth as you see it, and that has to come before being entertaining or consoling — in other words, it has to come before being popular.
As Michael Shayer writes in the preface to the first edition of “City”: “It is no use the intellectual trying to do the ordinary from the outside.” All this can produce is “a conventional view of what people are like. That it happens to be the convention that most people adopt most of the time doesn’t mean for a moment that it represents what they are really like. […] Ordinary people are not ordinary. Nor is the world. It is the business of the intellectual to see this. Not that he is any better than anyone else: only that he sees more.” So what works so well in “City” is that the speaker is very much inside and outside — intimately acquainted with the streets, districts and their denizens; but detached and imaginative enough to see things clearly and describe them honestly, sometimes in extraordinary detail.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Birmingham Dispatch to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.