Allen Fisher – författare

Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing since 1950 is an expansive and incisive examination of the patterns of connectedness in contemporary art and poetry. Allen Fisher—a highly accomplished poet, painter, critic, and art historian as well as a key figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s and 1970s—has a close and discerning connection to his subjects.In Imperfect Fit, Fisher focuses on the role of fracturing, ruptures, and breakages in many traditional ties between art and poetry, as well as the resulting use of collage and assemblage by practitioners of those arts. Fisher addresses, among other subjects, destruction as a signifier in twentieth-century art; the poetic employment of bureaucratic vocabularies and “business speak”; and the roles of public performance and memory loss in the fashioning of human knowledge and art.Commonplace notions of coherence, logic, and truth are reimagined and deconstructed in this study, and Fisher concludes by suggesting that contemporary culture offers a particularly robust opportunity—and even necessity—to engage in the production of art as a pragmatic act. Scholars of art, poetry, and aesthetics will be engaged and challenged by this insightful work.

Gravity presents the first five books of poems from the sequence Gravity as a consequence of shape, started in 1982 and scheduled for completion in 2005. Gravity includes the books Brixton Fractals, Breadboard, Civic Crime, Dispossession & Cure, and Fizz. The sequence is an inversion of empirical demands. Each untitled poem has been relabelled with a jazz dance from a list of dances, from African Boog to Zip. The design of the overall work uses the model of a crushed cylinder, the process of a crumbling wall and a variety of contingent energies, interrupted narratives demonstrating crowd-outs, descriptions of shifts in focal consciousness, fleeting interruptions that damage continuities and expectations with named actors; Burglar, Badger, Fireman, Mathematician. These narratives are supported by decoherent syntax, moving positions that question strident notions of coherence and over-determined incoherences. This is a syntax that sometimes avoids and sometimes embraces tried stanza structures through the use of unreliable sentences and designed forms that exercise deliberate breaks from golden mean or idealised exactness. The poems rely on inconsistency leading to prepared and unexpected transformations that link or rhyme into following or previous poems. One preparation involved labelling a cylinder with stanza indications to provide sonority, bending the cylinder in upon itself and producing new damaged sonorities from the crushed indications. This transformed geometry energises the process of aesthetic productions in each reader’s involvement. One activity transforms words by sound, another by meaning and another by inversion or critique of its proposals. One unrealised proposal is to demonstrate truth. Another is to confirm a lack of reliance upon expectation. The subjects bridge biotechnology and quantum physics through a system of urban gardening and leaking streets. The proposals demand civility and are preposterous.

"The first interview here with Allen Fisher dates from 1973. I took the decision to collect old interviews rather than make an all-new book. I am fascinated by the idea of a very long base line, records of one person's views over 30 years, change as part of the object recorded. Drawing on the creative input of Eric Mottram, Adrian Clarke, and Victoria Sheppard (among others) made the book more robust and embracing." (Andrew Duncan)