How to blog Roy Fisher? I'm not sure how I've managed without him, wonder why it's taken this long for me to read him, why nobody has insisted on him before. I don't know if I can capture what I love about his writing in little bits, it probably needs the momentum of whole poems and sequences to work. I'm starting with The Dow Low Drop, and it has instantly begun curing me of T.S. Eliot:
A fish,
Firelight,
A watery ceiling:
Under the door
The drunk wind sleeps.
The bell in the river,
The loaf half eaten,
The coat of the sky.
- 'Lullaby and Exhortation for the Unwilling Hero'
vegetable soul comes first
and if you give me nothing
more it is no lack
the old philosophers
but they've been wrong before
love always has a scapegoat.
plants, feeding
they don't do human things except in science fiction, hothouse
The stress carries an emotion, as the poem is performed. And like song, the voicing patterns in poetry point to a democratic potential. 'A stress is born in time, and in sound, meaning, and emotion; but it also stands outside time in a sort of minor, eternal present, a trembling instant which half stands still, partly resisting the flow of the line which creates it. It probably represents a little model of how our minds relate the instant of time to the flow of time; here lies its very great fascination.' 'A terrific ambiguity is set up between the beat and the flow in music. This is the essential ambiguity that makes the whole damn thing work.' This conviction led Doug to work to formulate his tentative yet infinitely careful philosophy of the instant, and its two-way facing possibilities. He had an idea of the moment as holding open on a sort of each-way hinge, where the outcome wasn't certain. Good poetry was utopian only in the exact sense that it resolved this tension in the instant into an achieved harmony. Poetry was an anticipation of a concord. The performed poem becomes an enactment of this concord; it prefigures in one realm what might ideally happen in another.
Poetic language – the poem on paper – is a concretization of the poetry of the world at large, the self, and the forces within the self; and those forces are rescued from formlessness, lucidified, and integrated in the act of writing poems. But there is a more ancient concept of the poet, which is that she is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Adrienne Rich, 'Vesuvius at Home'
The first of these seems outrageous enough to me; the second even more presumptive...
