Allen Fisher

Last updated

Allen Fisher in Speaking Portraits Allen Fisher in Speaking Portraits.jpg
Allen Fisher in Speaking Portraits

Allen Fisher (born 1944) is a poet, painter, publisher, teacher and performer associated with the British Poetry Revival.

Contents

Fisher was born in London and started writing poetry in 1962. In the late 1960s, he was involved with Fluxshoe, the United Kingdom offshoot of Fluxus, and performance has remained an important part of his practice. [1] He established himself as a poet through his early, decade-long, poetry project Place, which was published in a series of books and pamphlets during the 1970s. This project which drew, in part, on the Olson tradition of 'open field' projective verse poetics and, in part, on the procedural tradition of poets like Jackson Mac Low, was one of the major works of the British Poetry Revival, although it wasn't published as a single volume until 2005, when it was brought out by Ken Edwards's Reality Street. [2] After the abandonment (as planned) of Place, he worked on a project called Gravity as a consequence of shape from 1982 which he completed in 2007. As with Place, this was published in a series of books and pamphlets throughout this period. The total work amounts to some 800 pages. This project was followed by a book of emblems (poem-image-commentary) called "Proposals" and, in 2014, a collage book of poetry, visual images and prose quotations called "SPUTTOR". [3] In this work and others, the techniques of collage seen in his painting were also applied by Fisher to his poetic practice. [4] Fisher’s books are also "deeply interested in issues involving empathy and scientific enquiry". [5]

Fisher also made an important contribution to the British Poetry Revival as a publisher. As editor of Spanner and "New London Pride", he published many of the British Poetry Revival poets. [6] He was also co-editor of Aloes Books. Fisher has also sustained a concurrent art practice. During the 1980s, he gained a BA from Goldsmiths' College, University of London, where he was taught by Harry Thubron and Elma Thubron. He gained an MA from Essex University in Art History. He has had a number of solo shows, including 'Dispossession and Cure' at the Mayor's Parlour Gallery in Hereford. [7] His last retrospective painting show was in Hereford Museum & Art Gallery in 1993. He has over 150 publications in his name consisting of art documentation, poetry and theory. A book of essays "Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture and Perception" regarding American and British Poetry & Art Since 1950 and other essays on poetics was published by the University of Alabama in 2016. An edited collection of essays on his work from the start through to "SPUTTOR", "The Allen Fisher Companion", edited by Robert Hampson and cris cheek, was published by Shearsman in 2020. Forthcoming:an "Allen Fisher Reader".

Fisher is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has exhibited widely and his work is represented in the Tate Gallery.

He edits the magazine Spanner.

Select Bibliography 2004-2022

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English poetry</span>

This article focuses on poetry from the United Kingdom written in the English language. The article does not cover poetry from other countries where the English language is spoken, including the Republic of Ireland after December 1922.

The British Poetry Revival is the general name now given to a loose movement in the United Kingdom that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. The term was a neologism first used in 1964, postulating a New British Poetry to match the anthology The New American Poetry (1960) edited by Donald Allen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roy Fisher</span> English poet and jazz pianist

Roy Fisher 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, Sean O’Brien, Peter Robinson, Mario Petrucci and Gael Turnbull.

Gael Turnbull was a Scottish poet who was an important figure in the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s.

Eric Mottram was a British teacher, critic, editor and poet who was one of the central figures in the British Poetry Revival.

Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.

Lawrence Upton, was a poet, graphic artist and sound artist, and director of Writers Forum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Robinson (poet)</span> British poet (born 1953)

Peter Robinson is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire.

M. T. C. Cronin is a contemporary Australian poet.

Peter Riley is a contemporary English poet, essayist, and editor. Riley is known as a Cambridge poet, part of the group loosely associated with J. H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important center of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. Riley was an editor and major contributor to The English Intelligencer. He is the author of ten books of poetry, and many small-press booklets. He is also the current poetry editor of the Fortnightly Review and a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award in 2012 for "achievement and distinction in poetry".

David Miller is a writer, poet, literary critic, and editor. Born in Melbourne, Australia, he has lived in London since 1972.

Ken Edwards is a poet, editor, writer and musician who has lived in England since 1968. He is associated with The British Poetry Revival.

Richard Berengarten is an English poet. Having lived in Italy, Greece, the US and the former Yugoslavia, his perspectives as a poet combine English, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. His poems explore historical and political material, inner worlds and their archetypal resonances, and relationships and everyday life. His work is marked by its multicultural frames of reference, depth of themes, and variety of forms. In the 1970s, he founded and ran the international Cambridge Poetry Festival. He has been an important presence in contemporary poetry for the past 40 years, and his work has been translated into more than 90 languages.

Redell Olsen FEA is a British poet, performance artist, film-maker and academic. Her work incorporates traditional books alongside images, texts for performance, films, and site specific work. Olsen describes her work as involving avant-garde modernist and contemporary poetics, feminist theory and writing practice, Language Writing, ecology and environmental literatures, and performance.

Drew Milne is a contemporary British poet and academic.

John Muckle is a British writer who has published fiction, poetry and literary criticism.

Richard Deming is the Director of Creative Writing and a Senior Lecturer in English at Yale University, where he has taught since 2002.

Robert Sheppard is British poet and critic. He is at the forefront of the movement sometimes called "linguistically innovative poetry."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ágnes Lehóczky</span> Hungarian poet, academic and translator (born 1976)

Ágnes Lehóczky is a Hungarian-British poet, academic and translator born in Budapest, 1976.

Robert Gavin Hampson FEA FRSA is a British poet and academic. Hampson was born and raised in Liverpool, studied in London and Toronto and settled in London. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Royal Holloway. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Northumbria (2018-21) and Research Fellow at the Institute for English Studies, University of London (2019-23). He is a member of the Poetics Research Centre and the Centre for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway. He is well known for his contributions to contemporary innovative poetry and the international study of Joseph Conrad.

References

  1. ↑ Hampson, Robert "An Allen Fisher Companion", pub. Shearsman Books.
  2. ↑ Hampson, Robert "An Allen Fisher Companion", pub. Shearsman Books.
  3. ↑ British Council, Literature, Writers
  4. ↑ Scott Thurston, ‘Allen Fisher: Reading “Mummers’ Strut”’
  5. ↑ Virtanen, J., (2016) “Writing on: Context and Visual Culture in Recent Works of Allen Fisher and Ulli Freer”, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 8(1), e3. doi:
  6. ↑ State University of New York, writers' page:
  7. ↑ Joris, Pierre, "Toward Health", "An Allen Fisher Companion", pub. Shearsman Books.


George Gordon Byron2.jpg

This article about a poet from the United Kingdom is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.