Brief Takes: The Allen Fisher Companion

The Allen Fisher Companion

Edited by Robert Hampson and cris cheek
Shersman Books 2020
301 pgs.

It was fun spending a couple of weeks in the company of these essays. The work of British poet and artist Allen Fisher has often been difficult to get in the U.S.. Because of that and other (insert self-chastisement?) reasons, his work until now had been mostly rumor to me beyond a few pieces here and there.

The essays, by various writers, reveal Fisher as a link, not missing but necessary, across poetic and artistic approaches, including the mythologizing grandeur of Charles Olson, international experimental art practices like Fluxus and related endeavors from the late 60s and 70s and forward, and a documentary poetics of scientific and historical materialism that has become prominent again recently among poets in the last decade and more. Fisher’s use of science and history feel especially illuminated in the writing collected here. Different essays also point out that Fisher’s work has been devoted not just to making links between widely varying practices but to celebrating fissures and gaps and the possibilities of the unknown. If these essays are any evidence, Fisher doesn’t so much bring it all together as show how that can’t be done while at the same time exploring just how much there is to know.

Edited by Robert Hampson and cris cheek, the gathered essays and discussions in The Allen Fisher Companion explore various facets of Fisher’s writing, performance work, and art, including his grounding in philosophy and literary theory. All of the essays are informative even if some of them feel a little insular and overwritten. Insularity, of course, is one risk that a highly intellectual poetry like Fisher’s is always in danger of running. I appreciated the thoroughness of the analysis in this collection and enjoyed the occasional breaks into a more relaxed and poetic prose like that of cheek and Pierre Joris, who has two essays in the collection. The social and intellectual milieu of Fisher’s friends and poetic companions was especially intriguing and useful to learn about. Concluding the book are two long discussions with Fisher and other poets, including a series of letters between Fisher and British-Canadian poet Karen Mac Cormack.

I would say that I doubt this book will broaden the audience for Fisher’s work except that it had exactly that effect in my case. The work collected here establishes Fisher and his productions in various mediums as a central part of British poetry and art from the late 60s until now. Fisher comes across as someone who is always pushing, reaching, experimenting. At the heart of his work and this collection is the insistence that poetry can be a rigorously intellectual endeavor that combines multiple discourses and approaches in a way few other fields of contemporary writing do.