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This innovative edition brings together previously lost material to chart the genesis of a key work in 20th-century Modernist poetryWhen Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had 'started writing like mad' and produced 'a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen' he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that 'Birmingham is what I think with.' This 'mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography, ' as he called it, was written 'so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.'
All that was known of this work before Fisher's death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that - never otherwise published - it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet's literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher's signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet's archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction.
By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher's most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher's own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England's industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.
About the author
Roy Fisher (1930-2017) was born in Handsworth, Birmingham. He won a scholarship to the local grammar school, and later secured a place at Birmingham University where he read English and first published poems in the student magazine. To earn a living and support a family, he went into teaching, first at a grammar school in Newton Abbott, Devon, in the 1950s; he then returned to Birmingham and a job in a college of education. He was principal lecturer and head of department of English and Drama at Bordesley College of Education in Birmingham from 1963 to 1971, when he became a member of the Department of American Studies at Keele University. Through these three decades he pursued a second career as a semi-professional jazz musician. Since retiring he has lived in the Peak District. His early pamphlets, including City (1961) and Ten Interiors with Various Figures (1966) were first brought together in Collected Poems 1968. A larger gathering of further books and pamphlets, such as The Ship's Orchestra (1966), Matrix (1971), some of The Cut Pages (1971) and The Thing about Joe Sullivan (1978), appeared from OUP as Poems 1955-1980 (enlarged paperback edition, Poems 1955-1987). The long poem A Furnace also appeared from OUP in 1986, as did Birmingham River (1994). In 1996, Bloodaxe Books published The Dow Low Drop: New and Selected Poems, and followed it with The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005, Standard Midland in 2010 and Slakki in 2016. Flood Editions of Chicago have also published a Selected Poems for the US market.
Summary
The Citizen is an early prose work relating to Roy Fisher and his native city of Birmingham – previously thought to have been lost – which was the precursor of City, his signature collage of poetry and prose including prose sections from The Citizen. This edition includes the original text of The Citizen along with three variant versions of City.
