蜜芽传媒

Remembering Roy Fisher, who died on 21 March 2017. In this special extended interview, Ian McMillan visited the poet and jazz pianist at home in the Peak District for a broadcast that celebrated his 80th birthday in 2010.

Ian McMillan's Tribute to Roy Fisher

"When I was a young man growing up in South Yorkshire, Roy Fisher spoke to me deeply; I first came across his work in the late 1970's in his Carcanet book The Thing About Joe Sullivan; here was work that was deeply rooted in contemporary American poetry, in the freedom and traditions of jazz, in an appreciation of visual art, and above all in a sense that the voice you spoke in was the voice you could write in. As he memorably wrote/said, 'Birmingham's what I think with...'

The first time I met him I did a gig with him in a pub in Toddington called the Sow and Pigs and he was a still, calm presence as around him a kind of chaos swirled, with a drunk man selling vegetables and the novelist Jack Trevor Story running into the room in a cape and flying helmet shouting 'People, I am the president!' This exemplified Fisher's poetry to me: the stillness, the deflecting of noise, the idea that a space could be many things that could include us all.

I was proud to be able to choose his Selected Poems, The Long and the Short of It, published by Bloodaxe, as my book on Desert Island Discs, and I know that I'l be returning to that book over and over again in the next few weeks and months, now that one of the most important inhabitants of the island has gone."

Show less