Roy Fisher is a British

British literature

British Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. By far the largest part of British literature is written in the English language, but there are bodies of written works in Latin, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Manx, Jèrriais,...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 pianist. He was one of the first British writers to absorb the poetics of William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

 and the Black Mountain poets

Black Mountain poets

The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...

 into the British poetic tradition. Fisher was a key precursor of the British Poetry Revival

British Poetry Revival

The British Poetry Revival is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry.-Beginnings:...

.

Fisher was born in Handsworth

Handsworth, West Midlands

Handsworth is an inner city area of Birmingham in the West Midlands, England. The Local Government Act 1894 divided the ancient Staffordshire parish of Handsworth into two urban districts: Handsworth and Perry Barr. Handsworth was annexed to the county borough of Birmingham in Warwickshire in 1911...

, Birmingham

Birmingham

Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

 and studied at the University of Birmingham

University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...

. His early work, including City (1962), a work in which he applies the lessons of Williams' Paterson to the city of Birmingham, was admired in the United States but more or less ignored in his native country. It was because of the negative connotations for outsiders of "Birmingham" that the city's name did not once appear in City .

Fisher finally began to gain recognition in Britain with the publication of Poems 1955-1980 (1981). Between 1963 and 1971, he worked as Head of English and Drama at Bordesley College of Education. He then moved to the Department of American Studies at Keele University

Keele University

Keele University is a campus university near Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, England. Founded in 1949 as an experimental college dedicated to a broad curriculum and interdisciplinary study, Keele is most notable for pioneering the dual honours degree in Britain...

. He retired in 1982, after which he worked as a freelance writer and as a musician.

Fisher's later works include the long poem A Furnace (1986), Poems 1955-1987 (1988), The Dow Low Drop (1996), and Standard Midland (2010).

Outside the mainstream, Fisher is regarded by poets such as John Ash

John Ash (writer)

John Ash is an expatriate British poet and writer.His lifelong interest in Byzantium is a major theme which runs through his poetry, fiction and travel writing, along with family friends and the three major cities he has lived in...

, Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson (poet)

Peter Robinson is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire.-Life and career:...

 and critics like Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...

 as one of the most important post-war English poets. News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher edited by Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard appeared in 2000, and a book of critical essays, The Thing about Roy Fisher, edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson, was published the same year.

In 2005 Roy Fisher was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Royal Society of Literature

The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...

.

External links

• Roy Fisher at West Midlands Literary Heritage
• An interview with Roy Fisher
• An essay on Fisher by Marjorie Perloff
• Some Aspects of the Poetry of Roy Fisher by J. D. Needham 1975
• review of the "Long and the Short of It" by August Kleinzahler
• review of the "Long and the Short of It" by William Wotton
• review of the "Long and the Short of It" by Martin Caseley
• http://www.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr22/Peter%20Robinson/Robinson-review.pdf review of the "Long and the Short of It" by

Peter Robinson