• 30th January 1981 New Statesman announces “A spaniel in the works”

• 20th September 1980 Guardian reports “Spanner in the works”

• The First Twenty Five Years of Compendium Bookshop 1968–1993 souvenir brochure includes Allen Fisher’s Brixton Fractals in its All-Time Greats in Poetry – the best 20

• AF’s 1996 public itinerary includes “FRAMES & DISORDER” an introduction to the poetics of geometric and constructionist facture, readings at SPACEX Gallery and East West Gallery, Charles Olson and proprioception paper at Contemporary Poetry & Performance Conference at Centre for English Studies in May

• Harry Gilonis in March 1990 reports to Complexity in Music Festival, Amsterdam includes quotations from Allen Fisher and Thomas A. Clark, Tom Raworth and Bill Griffiths, Colin Simms and Tony Baker, Maggie O’Sullivan Ric Caddel as well as Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky against discussion of Xenakis, Ferneyhough, Zimmerman, Guus Janssen, Nono

• Reviewing Breadboard in Exquisite Corpse no.60, Illinois State University, Bill Sherman writes,

. . . before he chose to leave London to work in the countryside:

My need for seclusion, as for food, restorative
against any State obligation to develop a detachment
or to see beyond depression and emptiness
To see the pointless liberation in used energies
where thuggery transcends class

Fisher was already moving beyond the naturalism of his early American influences, like Olson, and although quite aware of the methodologies of the U.S. “Language” poets, opted for a more multi-dimensional approach. He felt no need to regress to post-Joycean rationalisations for failures of the imagination in the guise of the political . . .

This is a challenging and open-ended discourse in poetry. Breadboard, defined as “a roughly made experiments model for a device used to test the design parameters” is a taking-stock, a regathering of energies for the formerly Lambeth-based poet and painter.

• In April 1992 Fisher’s paper to the Wye Valley Art Society on “Aspects of Landscape painting in Europe since 1900” opened,

Many of the ways of producing painting changed in the Nineteenth century. Landscape painting was no exception to this change. The compositional ordering in Landscape painting explicit in the seventeenth century work of Poussin and Claude, and those aspects of the art derived from the work of such painters as Rubens and Ruisdæl, was transformed by new æsthetic positions formulated by the Romantics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Romantics’ holistic, expressive, hierophantic and organic theories of art provided the ground for what became one of the major nineteenth century modes of artistic production – the landscape painting. The subsequent developmental work by Realist, Naturalist and Symbolist painters then provided the grounding for the work of the early twentieth century . . .

• The advertisement for Allen Fisher as Writer/Artist In Residence at 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, “Experimental Poet from Britain,” appeared in Poetry Flash 112, in July 1982 along with the announcement of Kenneth Rexroth’s death in June.

• Barry Fogden reviewed Dispossession & Cure for Iron, 75, North Shields, Northumberland, in June 1995:

Well, if contemporary poetry really needs its imaginative remit extended (and it certainly needs something), it could do worse than trace the development of Allen Fisher’s work over the last thirty years. . . . the difficulty resides in the investment of time which the reader will need to make in fixing his or her cognitive and æsthetic attention on the text, testing its resistance, working against it or going with it. We are not, I think, in the land of the arbitrary surface signifier that typifies, for instance, much L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, but we are certainly faced with a very personal conceptual schema.

This is one book I can’t guide you through: I can simply suggest what you will need to be aware of, will need to be prepared to do, if you are to enter Fisher’s project and his world, and see what rewards are to be had.

• In September 1994 RWC Extra published its “Documenting SubVoicive 2,” pamphlet. Allen Fisher read on 19th June 1981, 2nd December 1982, 4th February 1986, 12th May 1987, 21st June 1988, 13th January 1989 (the SCRAM reading), 6th October 89 with Eric Mottram and Clive Bush, 6th October 1992 with Sianed Jones, September 1994 (Dispossession & Cure book launch). The advert for September 1994 reads:

LOAD SHIFT
DORKING THE LAKE
FORK FIT

• The Fluxshoe detective heading in The Independent, Tuesday 19 April, referred to Andrew Graham-Dixon’s review of the Tate’s Fluxbritannica:Aspects of the Fluxus Movement 1962-73 show. “Allen Fisher’s Milk in Bottles, which has survived only in the form of a black-and-white photograph of a man poring water from one milk bottle into another: it is described as “a long participatory poem in apathy, fear and fatigue”.”

• Andrew Duncan writes, in June 1992, following the Paladin Future Exiles 3-person anthology,

I would like to suggest that one stratum of Fisher’s work resembles the Epidemiai of Hippocrates: where H. records in terse sharp phrases facts of geography, climate, diet, and way of life as part of medical study. His understanding of “disease as a function of place” is not ours, but it is easy to understand that passing beyond the few large crude objects of Emotions one tries seize the many fine “feelings” which make up the self, in a scope which certainly includes other people, sunlight, the weather, housing, food, economics, etc., to reach happiness through the balance of passions. One would argue that this Chinese-style souci du soi replaces the primitive and irresoluble opposition between “ideal self” and “oppressed self” which beleaguered the factions of 1968. If you define your “real self” as “that which I have never experienced,” problems may follow.

As observations, this is in fact the opposite of “procedures”: but perhaps the two go together: as interlinked parts of the artist’s domestic routine, in the project of not being alienated. One would guess that Allen actually knows why he feels good or bad on a particular day. I’m a bit chary, these days, of the “processual” aspects of Fisher’s work; things I say about that could easily apply to someone else’s work which I find grotesque and vapid. I would lay far more stress on its loved-over and sensuously refined aspects. Of course, the procedures are necessary to strip away the layer of professionalization whose smoothness ends responsivity and attentiveness. Thinking about procedures saved my life as an artist, maybe this isn’t so vital for the reader. F. must throw almost everything away, because everything in print (since about 1971) is so good. . . .

This medical approach is perhaps why I am now reminded of John Wilkinson: both, perhaps, see subjective consciousness, not as dirt to be administered away, but as the supreme subject of medical research; weary of the mediæval language we record emotions with, they subdivide into far richer lexicon, making reference data available to found it. They push at the limits of language and comprehension simply because they feel that conversation, and our internal representations of other people’s feelings, are not good enough. How hard to avoid the bourgeois project of explaining that “your feelings don’t count because you aren’t professionally qualified” and “your words don’t count because your language isn’t good enough (hasn’t got enough cultural capital”.

It would be quite wrong to suggest that Fisher is not an emotional writer. One thinks of the “ego-free environment” sometimes called for in a certain stage of software design. An ego-free environment is a room with no people in it. The infantile part-self does not vanish with maturity, it always goes on. Striving for superordinate goals, you blank out factors which go on without you. By declining knowledge you expose yourself to surprise and so lose control. Stabilizing the inner environment by cutting intake means so the loss of stability. It is important to notice the subjective passages, and “Delight enclosure” is one of these.

• A close reading of “Enclosed Delight” was published by Andrew Duncan in the “Art-Politics” Angel Exhaust 11, Winter 1994, “The Long Shrine of Hunger”.

• Charles Bernstein reviewed Future Exiles for Sulfur no.35 in 1994, as part of his article, “Leaking Truth: British Poetry in the 90s”.

Fisher’s ambitious projects, most particularly a thorough refiguring of the complex of relations among information systems, theories of knowledge and poetic processes, are represented here mostly by inclusion of work from the 80s that demonstrates how a “multiplicity of attentions” leads to a poetics of “informed intuition”. Stepping Out (Pig Press, 1989) is Fisher’s most recent title readily available in the U.S. , I highly recommend it.

• Ralph Willet, University of Hull, reviews Cracking the Ike Age for The British-American Vol.5 Nos. 1&2, Winter 1993. “Allen Fisher’s examination of the Fifties visual arts is strong on æsthetics while steering clear of the Cold War.”

• The Hereford Times for Thursday, July 18, 1991 reads:

Poet who practices what he teaches.

Allen Fisher, lecturer in the history of art and design at Herefordshire College of Art and Design, will show that he practices what he teaches at an exhibition of recent works on paper at the Old Mayor’s Parlour in Church Street in Hereford. . . .

The Bishop of Hereford came to the Opening which was on Sunday July 28th. Immediately on entry he crossed to Paige Mitchell serving drinks at the table, “What does he mean by Dispossession & Cure?” She directed him to AF who conversed with Bishop Oliver on the dispossessed in Hereford, the displaced peoples in the world, the nomads and the travellers. The Bishop left knowing this show was not about to involve Satanic rites on a Sunday in at lane leading from his cathedral.

• The flyer from Paladin read, “The first volume, Future Exiles, features three poets whose lives and work were grounded for many years in London, but who have now all scattered to other parts of the country.”

• A flyer from fragmente, for the 1992 reading at the Quarrell Room, Exeter College, Oxford, Allen Fisher and John Wilkinson, reads:

As poet and theorist, Allen Fisher has been influential in creating a new awareness of art as a connective process through which the diverse languages of modern society, technical, biological, æsthetic, political, can be reworked against the grain of their traditional definitions and uses. The resulting texts provide what he calls ‘a participatory invention different from that which most persists.’ Fisher was a member of the international art group Fluxus and now edits the magazine Spanner . . .

• In an undated 11 page manuscript, “If we agree what spontaneous means . . . : Selected Work by Allen Fisher and Some Problems of Writing Poetry in a Scientific Culture,” used as the basis for his paper at the SubVoicive Colloquium in ?1992 (write to GA about this), Gilbert Adair provided one the first public understandings of AF’s work. His text focussed in on two books and an essay: DEFAMILIARISING ____________* ; Ideas on the culture dreamed of; and “The Topological Shovel,” published in Reality Studios.

[Issues of contestation arise from (i) from implying that Dictionary theory is difficult to operate in science, when this would apply to ANY discipline and (ii) thinking that the work takes place in a Scientific Culture, as if this were different from the culture we are actually in. (letter to Gilbert Adair from af, 30th March ’97)]

Page 2 notes,

So how to chart our meanings in the ever more elusive conditions of the late twentieth century? Ideas on the culture dreamed of (1982) is the remarkable “apparatus or glossary” for DEFAMILIARISING ____________* (1983) – a glossary not always easier to understand than the text it seemingly offers to decode:

Second week these simplicities complexed radio jets: chorus hooks: and planetary bow [D : 11]

[Ideas] 37. radio jets. radio window.

. . . In the nuclei of most radio galaxies is a spinning black hole surrounded by a torus, vid. Ideas 43, gas too hot and tenuous to radiate efficiently. [This is also reworked in DEFAMILIARISING ____________* : 15. ]It anchors magnetic fields and extracts rotational energy from the hole of two collimated beams, vid. Ideas 9, of relativistic particles and fields. These beams drive the observed radio jets and hot spots.

But how?

Well, take another definition of one of these terms, from the 1964 Penguin Dictionary of Science:

RADIO GALAXIES. Galaxies [qv] which emit electromagnetic radiation [qv] of radio frequencies [qv] as observed by the techniques of radio astronomy [qv] . . .

You get the drift: the single entry has no place in a dictionary theory. Section 1 of Ideas includes elucidatory references to four other sections, five bibliographical resources, and one Appendix. One of these sections, “35. quasar”, gives onto nine others, including Section 1. It is aesthetic, and critical, action through high self-consciousness of an already non-hierarchical and incompletable form. . . .

On pages 4-5, GA writes,

There’s some irony in these ideas being replayed, in so-called “critical theory”, as anti-bourgeois because non-humanist. The bourgeoisie hasn’t been interested in ‘humanism’ for two centuries, not since investment in technology tightened in a nexus with increase of wealth, and truth was redefined as that provable by expensive instruments. Newtonian mechanics was therefore used for two centuries under the burgeoning criterion of “performance maximisation” – Lyotard’s term for the full-blown ‘postmodern’ terrorism . . .

On Page 5:

With scientific languages, then, the notion of translation – ‘Explain that in my language’ – breaks down very soon: not only between scientists and ‘laity’, but across scientific divisions (Ideas 32 gives four definitions of “plasma”, according to specialism) . . .

On pages 6–7, under the heading “STRUCTURE”, GA writes,

DEFAMILIARISING ____________* is made up of 27 sections in double-spaced dark grey mostly italic typeface (DSG), and 12 sections in single-spaced red typeface (SSR). The structure (based on Brian Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study I ) could be called a lattice: the horizontal DSG lines are repeated vertically in the SSR lines. So DSG section 1-3 give sequentially the 1st words of nearly all the lines in the 12 SSR sections; sections 6-8, the 2nd words in the SSR’s, and so on. The last section, 39, should therefore give the 20th SSR words. Since there are only a few lines with as many words as that, the book’s ending could curve into points in its own interior: “to free our intuition from three-dimensional experience”, as René Thom says. At the end of DSG section 29, however, the structure has broken down. What ‘should’ be lines of 11th words are often 10th words (and sometimes neither). This in fact presupposes small bucklings, perturbations of symmetry, throughout. The DRG/SSR split is catastrophically marked from section 32 on. The last section is 2 new words: “changed (illegally)”.

The lattice intersects, recontextualises and thickens a cluster of repeating words, a largely restricted vocabulary, repeating in any case more than the lattice would determine.

This is followed by the section headed “CURE”,

This is not poetry designed delightfully to rearrange your brain for a while. Its outmost ambition is to effect durable changes in perception and understanding. This is coupled, in an interview for Angel Exhaust, with a necessary disclaimer:

[The project] aspires to cure malaise inside the comprehension that such a conception remains idealist and incompatible with each new realisation.

On page 8 GA writes,

First Allen, then Lyotard, seize on Thom’s catastrophe mathematics and the fractal mathematics of Benoit Mandelbrot (now part of ‘chaos’) as disproving systematic determinism and that finer and finer calculations increase precision of measurement. “Uncertainty” at macro-levels. Thom’s work however – a “geometrical theory of morphogenesis, independent of the substrate of forms and the nature of the forces that create them” – has been used in British prisons to prevent riots; and business guides are now appearing with titles like Managing Chaos. ‘Multi-applicable is a better term for these sciences than ‘neutral’, which implies they come value-free: “Subjection to meaning gets/ replaced with morphology.” The aesthetic is a seizure of the already loaded.

On page 9:

DEFAMILIARISING ____________* can be interrupted by its glossary – has to be – for indeterminate times, on indeterminate forkings. The meaning-speeds, in parallel processing, break into a post-Newtonian simultaneity, where ‘simultaneity’ loses its “absolute” character: “coincident signals in different frequency channels”. How to unify, in continuous covariance, the electromagnetic force with the strong and weak nuclear interactions? . . .

Later, under the heading “IDEAS”:

A glossary as itself æsthetic action, a conviction of content forcing extreme form. Includes a parody of name-dropping record-sleeve gossip, “trivium” now meaning “the three anterior radii of an echinoderm”. Pilings-up of technical terms – an invitation further to consider “plasmolysis and plasmodesmata in plant physiology” – comic jolts from the plausible spell. A discussion of black holes and the possibility of finding in interstellar gas the dynamics of a “perfect fluid, moving”, interrupts itself: “Ask, if we agree what perfect means, what is meant by saying it can move?”

On page 10, under the heading “SYMMETRY-BREAKING”:

Say that the serious question there is: What would a non-symmetrical form be like? If it’s four-dimensional, it has to move. A form where nothing is lost or dispersed – that is the circle’s promise, the arch-symmetry of extreme tensions without discharge. The conservation of mass and energy. The universe may not be a pulse, ever-expanding would need the “spontaneous symmetry-breaking” referred to in Allen’s essay “The Topological Shovel” (1982), effected “in the ultra violet or unseen region as if there are no masses”.

Later on page 10, the heading “MATTER/TRANSLATION”:

From “The Topological Shovel”: “To show that words on a page may be discovered in terms of their viscosity [brought into play in a liquid moving with different velocities]... Words’ resistance to shear forces and hence to flow . . . the make up from the body’s own fields, kinetics and particles . . . the movements of the said and the increase of all the parts felt as a whole. A cross-section of interactions where decoupling is partial, in between the reader’s nervous system and a phase considered as environment.” And all of these passages.

Page 11 concludes with the heading “CLUSTER” followed by “EXAMPLE”; GA writes,

A lattice of repetitions with no ground – but a minute tracing of physiological changes in a total scientific permeation. “[C]onsumption seizes activities” in the the labour/leisure chain; “reels” or circular dances. Vocabulary desensifying as ambience is the action; as replay gains these strange terms resonances, the action goes syntactic, forces the uncertain value of word-collisions; in these laboratory terms, the most ordinary words – “duck”, “snow”, “blanket” – shock as illegitimate; comparing the unrelated, “shocks hook distance”: propulsion into red shift. Harmonic (sine-wave) and non-harmonic (oscillators, electrical/mechanical dualities, versus the possibilities of discharge investing a coexistence sociality. Body-reading effects of a boiling around restricted morphogenesis. Playing these cosmic speculations as speculative metaphors; delight through outrageous conjunction-form-puns; giving a bumpy ride to the excitements it’s incited.

• In December 1989, City Limits published a review by Don Watson of Stepping Out:

. . . a perfect example of the contemporary British Poetry which sends critics into a froth. Seen in a fine art context, constructing and manipulating images, there is nothing inaccessible about this work. ‘The Art of Flight’ is reminiscent of Marinetti’s assertion that the new poet would describe the movement of electrons. Focus moves from the image itself to the details of its perception. Sound and rhythm give shape to an exercise in colour and form. Some stanzas seem to expand endlessly, as in ‘Developing Immanence’: ‘reflections from night walls rowing light superimposition made/without layer form in silence of sleeping morning cortex’. Like the finest painters, Fisher takes us through a different way of seeing the world, the medium of poetry holding sway over time as well as space.

• In The Times (date?), cris cheek writes,

A central figure to both international and British networks of independent publishers and writers, Allen Fisher . . . reads in London all too infrequently. The verse above the picture (the page beginning “Ours must be to replant the core/the conscious dream can include it . . .” over a photograph of AF in front a shelf of books of which Paradise as a Garden can be deciphered) is an extract from his collection “Becoming” (December 1978). When he reads in London , as he will tomorrow, he bring work hot from the print-out tray and as a result these are events that delight and surprise sizable gatherings. He will be presenting material generated from Prometheus Unbound: “fly” and “convalescence” from his continuing sequence “gravity as a consequence of shape”. Fisher is one of the most innovative and challenging writers to have emerged in Britain over the past two decades. He has made use of an astonishing range of compositional processes in more than 50 books. The word “process” is a key to much of his activity. His is a writing that confronts a society overwhelmingly dominated by the trumpeting of products for consumption. His work suggests a need to pay a careful balance of attention to those processes of creativity and understanding that can present more long-term satisfactions in the future. In doing so he asks pointed questions, with great wit and humour. Audiences are once again beginning to want serious substance and his is a positive voice with which to start. SubVoicive, The Victoria . . .

• In The Hereford Times, 19.3.92, “Featured in new series,” “A Hereford-based poet, painter and lecturer is featured in the first of a new series of poetry anthologies.”

Allen Fisher who is a senior lecturer at Herefordshire College of Art & Design is one of three poets – described as “late Renaissance men” – included in “Future Exiles”.

Mr. Fisher, who showed work at the Mayor’s Parlour, Hereford , last year, has been described as “a poet and theorist who has been influential in creating a new awareness of art as a connective process . . .

• Tim Allen reviewed Dispossession and Cure in Terrible Work magazine, ?date. “I don’t suppose", he wrote, “Alan Fisher’s work is usually associated with comedy. It is not a quality I associate with his ‘Scram’ for example. Yet ‘Dispossession & Cure” (the 4th book of his ongoing ‘Gravity as a Consequence of Shape’) ripples with the laughter of so many discovered ‘humours’ that it becomes, not a matter of control (joke) – decontrol (laughter), but a matter of decontrolles (jokes) – controls (laughs). Laughter as a control? This is where Fisher is a poet and just a conceptualist. I have to admit that I have never been a fully payed-up member of the Fisher Fan Club: the work comes with a cold buzz difficult to talk to. (We do talk to our conception of a ‘poet’.) When does the cold sting of a needle become the hot sting of an insect? Answer: when we thoroughly enjoy an Allen Fisher poem, and the ecstatic agony injected through the works in the section ‘Art Bisaster Continuum’ leave me screaming my laughter. I am the reader and I am in perfect control.”

• It was “A.K." who reviewed SCRAM for Terrible Work, ?date:

Where to start? So much to discover and learn in this book. And such a pleasure to see a poem about ‘Hilbert Space’ which I can actually get my teeth into! Being a mathematician, Hilbert Spaces are a topic close to my heart, and it is nice to read a poet who doesn’t over romanticise mathematics and theoretical physics. The title ‘Gravity a a Consequence of Shape’ captures in one phrase all the poetry of one of the two great physical theories of the twentieth and (unless there is a dramatic breakthrough soon) of the twenty-first centuries. There is no division between science and art, only between scientists and artists. Fisher’s work is the perfect vehicle for demonstrating this: it is as solid as a good theorem . . . At the same timer it can have the inscrutability of those ‘deep’ theorems. However, the great secret with appreciating inscrutable deep theorems, I have found, is patience and wide reading. And so it is with Fisher. An apparent separation between Fisher’s work and mathematical theorems (a gap often called the ‘False Fisher Fissure’) is the ability of AF’s poems to tolerate “the manufacturing of understanding”. Does a complex theorem exist which can be read in different ways, ‘understood’ in different depths, and maybe even partially appreciated by an amateur mathematician? Not a very scientific idea perhaps, but much of AF’s poetry achieves these qualities in analogy. . . .

 Fisher . . . does a lot of the work for me; his self-contained world is diverse and hard. Like that feeling as a child when I discovered an abandoned shipwreck on a bouldered beach: so much to explore and so much time to do it!

• Peter Barry included his chapter “Allen Fisher and ‘content-specific’ poetry in New British poetries, The scope of the possible, edited by Robert Hampson and Peter Barry, Manchester University Press, 1993.

. . . the method (of Place ) remains fairly constant throughout, with open-field collages of quoted material and commentary being interwoven, and a range of thematic concerns and recurrent images quickly establishing themselves . . .

. . . the focus is, in varying degrees, the author in the act of reading, so that readers need to reactivate that body of reading in order to enter the poem. It is important to realise, though, that doing this isn’t just a preliminary to the reading of the poem: a reciprocal process takes place in which we read the sources in the light of the poem and the poem in the light of the sources, and this is the characteristically modernist reading experience. so the text is (to subvert a Barthesian term) readerly in two senses: firstly, it is about reading, as a way of engaging with and making sense of the world, and secondly, it demands the reader’s sustained participatory engagement with its materials, as well as with ‘the words on the page’. . . .

. . . Place takes as its focus South London , where Fisher was living at the time of composition. The abiding concern is what Eric Mottram calls a ‘locationary action’, the subject’s attempts to ‘place’ himself, within a specific locale, within his culture, and within the historical and political juncture we inhabit with him . . .

. . . one of his main innovations is his detailed use of scientific and historical data, as exemplified by the ‘lost rivers’ material discussed here.

. . . it might be useful to have a name for poetry of this kind, poetry which explores highly specific materials and data with heuristic intent and as implicit metaphor. A useful analogy is with the kind of art known as ‘site-specific’ work, typified by the large-scale public sculptures and installations of David Mach. His installation ‘Here to Stay’ of 1990 used over 100 tons of magazines and newspapers to construct twelve giant columns around the cast-iron supports of the Tramway exhibition centre in Glasgow . ‘Site-specific’ work like this is built into and integrated with its display space: it therefore challenges the most basic assumptions about art objects (for instance, that they should be permanent, portable, and saleable) and demands new kinds of interaction between art-work and audience (for instance, it deconstructs the basis of conventional æsthetic judgments and values). Likewise, poetry such as Fisher’s is fully integrated with the scientific, historical, and social data which is built into it, thereby challenging preconceptions about what constitutes the poetic, and demanding the kind of ‘study reading’ mentioned above. We might therefore call such work ‘content-specific’ poetry.

The second part of the chapter addresses “Using the ‘Lost Rivers’”.

. . . all the conclusions reached or posited in section IV are provisional and tentative: Remarks such as ‘I couldn’t get to the matter of this’ (45) and ‘I was uncertain of the trouble here’ (70) are typical of its meditative tone; the ‘measure’ throughout the section, as throughout much of the whole work, is that of the mind thinking, it faithfully reproduces the characteristic hesitations, doublings, and parentheses of all original thought, what Coleridge memorably called ‘the drama of reason’ (letter to Poole, January 28, 1810). . . .

In section 7 of Peter Barry’s chapter, he notes:

. . . The human ingenuity which allows boats to pass London Bridge without underneath it is emblematic of the fact that Place is not in any sense the expression of a sentimental wish to escape a polluted present-day culture by reverting to a more ‘natural’ past. On the contrary, it is guardedly optimistic about the possibility of salvaging a future by an eclectic blend of the recoverable past and the decipherable present. If we can break our habits of thought, Fisher seems to say, we can perhaps hope to do more than just survive. If we don’t, the evidence increasingly shows, we can hardly hope to do even that.

. . . the pages often have a dialogic structure featuring several voices, including those of the ‘source authors’, and they lack a privileged and authoritative overview, being instead ‘open-field’ structures in the classic modernist way. In a phrase, content-specific poetry often takes poetry readers into cultural space they have not previously entered.

• Ken Edwards writing for fragmente 5, 1993, in his ‘Bloom in the plain acoustic’ reviews AF’s Steeping Out and Talus 4/5:

You get the constant feeling reading through any part of the unnamed ‘project’ that Allen Fisher initiated in the early 1980s (following the conclusion of the place sets) that it is all bound to come into focus shortly. And yet it never does, and it could never so so, a fact which gives the project part of its rationale.

. . . Stephen Hawking, for example, has famously speculated that . . . an ultimate theory would enable us to apprehend the mind of God. That is, everything would be in focus, as it were. Allen Fisher’s poetics both implicitly and expressly rule out the possibility of such grand recuperation.

In conversation and in other writing, Fisher has often referred to physicists such as Hawking as ‘theological’. His explanation of this is that they require a summarising entity, or overall effectivity. The Fisher project deliberately does not. In a letter to this reviewer, he says, ‘I do not base my proposals on a belief structure – nor upon certainty of any substance – on the contrary I expect a multiple virtuality which cannot be stabilised or made definitive.’

• Gilbert Adair, interviewed by Angel Exhaust 8, Autumn 1992

. . . for instance Allen did a reading (at King’s College), and Eric introduced Place as “the most significant poetry of the last decade” I went out the next day to all these book shops and said, sell me Allen Fisher books.

(cynical chuckle)

. . . But it may also be that fewer young poets, listening to or reading the kind of work that interests us, feel that instant excitement I did when I heard Place.

The thing that’s so different about Defamiliarising____________*, unlike every poem I know except The Waste Land, is that it’s actually accompanied by a separate book which is a glossary of its terms. And the glossary complexities in all sorts of interesting ways that I was trying to pick out in that paper. I’m taking it that the materials themselves suggested the need for a glossary, that extra intervention. . . .

• Writing for fragmente 4, After Modernism, Autumn/Winter 1991, Andrew Duncan notes, in a review of Floating Capital,

Allen Fisher deliberately built the space in which this poetry would be possible; with a piece of chalk on a wooden floor. Even the people he invented can’t write like him – more literal imitation would be a very good idea. Remote sensing; starlight jumps straight into the pupil as vessel which catches light reverberating from one inch, 100 inches, 100 feet, 2000 feet away. No-one before Fisher has grasped this fact so lucidly; he sees a river where other people see a blank wall. He is the only artist documenting the mystery which surrounds the skin on both sides. He writes lie Frankenstein lashed to a mast in the midst of cosmic storms. . . . This whole group exists in Fisherspace (although Allen’s approach to the beat is totally different). . . .

• In February 1992 a pile of “responder’s” letters (after the poem how can this ever be enough) came from Steven Pereira for the AF issue of Responses. Judith concluded, “I can’t say that I liked this poem – but then I don’t think that it asks to be liked. I did feel enmeshed in it by the end.”

• Keith Tuma notes in British-Poets e-mail 16/10/97 : “. . . Lots of ways knowledge etc. might enter into poems: catastrophe theory, for instance, does not exactly enter Allen F’s _Gravity_ series via allusion . . .”

• Peter Middleton noted in April 2000 (in Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol.5, no.1),

Compare the I in the lines – “I lift a tract from the shelf / and weigh it” – from part six of Allen Fisher’s “Bel-Air,” in which the divulgence of the personal narrative is outweighed by the generalising framework of speculation about mass and interpretation. . . . This does not imply any self-consciousness when it imparts this report to the reader. This is not an author telling his story (and this conclusion is irrespective of whether this I is a fictive persona as might be the case in Fisher’s South London comedy of art).

Further Reading: a selection 1976–2002

Peter Middleton (2002), “‘Performing An Experiment, Performing a Poem’: Allen Fisher and Bruce Andrews.” Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance & Site Specificity, edited by David Kennedy and Keith Tuma, Sheffield: The Cherry On The Top Press.

Rob Holloway (2001), “Allen Fisher and Karen Mac Cormack at Phillytalks and Fisher's Waddle.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Tony Lopez (2000), “Innovative Poetry in English.” Essays in Liminality and Text, ed. Isabel Soto, Madrid: The Gateway Press.

Scott Thurston (1999), “Allen Fisher: The Technology of Vision.” Tradition and Post-modernity, The Krakow, Poland: Jagiellonian University.

Robert Sheppard (1999), “Irregular Actions,” a chapter in Far Language: Poetics and Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–1997, Devon: Stride Publications.

Robert Sheppard (1999), “The Poetics of Poetics: Charles Bernstein, Allen Fisher and the poetic thinking that results.” Symbiosis, Devon: Stride Publications.

Robert Sheppard (1999), “Creative Linkage in recent British linguistically innovative poetry.” Assembling Alternatives, edited by Romana Huk, University Press of New England, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press.

Keith Tuma (1999), section in Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain (1999), introduction to Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press.

Clive Bush (1997), Out of Dissent: Five Contemporary British Poets, chapter two on the work of Allen Fisher, University of London: Talus Books.

Tim Woods (1996), “Place project and the ‘Spatial Turn,’” University of Aberystwyth (issued in Parataxis).

Drew Milne (1994), exchange of letters in Parataxis: modernism and modern writing, Falmer, Brighton: University of Sussex.

Paige Mitchell (1993), A Projected New Consciousness, York: King's Manor Gallery.

Robert Hampson and Peter Barry, eds (1993), chapter on Allen Fisher's work in New British Poetries: The scope of the possible, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Adrian Clarke and Andrew Duncan (1992), special issue of Angel Exhaust magazine, Cambridge: Angel Exhaust.

Anthony Mellors (1992), review of work by Allen Fisher, Oxford: Fragmente.

David Bromige (1982), chapter in 80 Langton Street Residence Program, San Francisco: 80 Langton Street.

Robert Young (1976), essay on The Art of Flight. The Oxford Literary Review.