{"id":3348,"date":"2017-03-22T12:40:56","date_gmt":"2017-03-22T12:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/?p=3348"},"modified":"2017-06-07T10:56:14","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T10:56:14","slug":"roy-fisher-1930-2017-a-tribute-film-of-his-last-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/roy-fisher-1930-2017-a-tribute-film-of-his-last-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Roy Fisher 1930-2017: a tribute &#038; film of his last reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Roy Fisher&#039;s final reading at the Flying Goose Cafe, Beeston, October 28th, 2010.\" width=\"769\" height=\"433\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-muPBkTND4o?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I came late to the poetry of the great Roy Fisher. Early this century, my friend John Lucas persuaded him over to the Lowdham Poetry Festival, where, on a blustery day, under a tent, Roy read some of his poems and played a little piano (he was a fine Jazz pianist). Roy talked with my partner about their shared experience in teacher training and we were given his new and selected, <em>The Dow Low Drop<\/em>, the first of many books that Roy signed for us. A few years later, planning the Beeston International Poetry Festival, I suggested we try and get Roy to give a reading, though he didn\u2019t get about much, being wheelchair-bound. His friend, the poet, Ann Atkinson was still alive then, and acted as chauffeur. Roy read with Matt Welton at the Flying Goose Caf\u00e9 in Beeston. He began his set by establishing his bona fides, as he put it, with \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pc1svrbcC8Y&amp;t=17s\">Poetry Promise<\/a>\u2019. I filmed this poem and \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RxaEbvyMye0\">Inner Voice<\/a>\u2019 for a facebook group. Last year, with his permission, I put both of these videos on YouTube. The quality\u2019s not great, as they were taken with a Flip-camera, but this was the last reading that Roy gave and it was a lovely, packed event. I filmed all of the 13 minute second set that closed the evening. Today, in tribute to him, I\u2019ve uploaded the whole thing. You can watch it above. That\u2019s Ann Atkinson, sat to his right, and John Lucas on his left.<\/p>\n<p>We visited Roy at his home near Buxton the summer before last. He didn\u2019t get about much, but had plenty of friends who came to help, and was good company. I gave him a DVD with highlights of the many Jazz and Poetry evenings I\u2019d filmed, which he would have enjoyed being at. He gave us a copy of <em>An Easily Bewildered Child<\/em>, his collected occasional prose. We would have gone again, but my partner became seriously ill, and now Roy\u2019s gone. He died this week after, I\u2019m told, slowly fading for a couple of weeks. I\u2019d hoped to see him in the summer, and take a copy of the next issue of <em>New Walk<\/em> magazine. I&#8217;ve written a review essay called \u2018Poetry and Old Age\u2019, about Prynne, Ashbery and Roy\u2019s final book <em>Slakki: new and neglected poems.\u00a0<\/em>He had stopped writing by 2015 and there will be no more. It is to Peter Robinson\u2019s great credit that this book came out.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s a bit from that review:<\/p>\n<p>These may be final poems, but there is no falling off in them, only an inevitably elegiac quality. The last new poem, \u2018While There\u2019s Still Time\u2019, from 2014, threatens that the poet will return \u2018in the form of a nut-brown silver banded bassoon.\u2019 In its comic, confident conclusion, the great poet imagines himself being played \u2018on the tarmac triangle\/at the crook of Kentish Road\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>Make no mistake:<\/p>\n<p>My voice will be heard once again,<\/p>\n<p>and as never before.<\/p>\n<p>I was pleased that Ian McMillan (one of Fisher\u2019s biggest fans \u2013 Ian chose Roy&#8217;s collected poems as his book on <em>Desert Island Discs<\/em>) chose the same lines to cite in his review for <em>The North<\/em>. I\u2019ll have to add another paragraph to my piece now. Not of mourning, but of celebration: for a sweet, sweet man, a fine jazz pianist, a true educator and poems that will last for as long as poetry is read. He had a life well lived and we\u2019re lucky to have been around for some of the same time. R.I.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came late to the poetry of the great Roy Fisher. Early this century, my friend John Lucas persuaded him over to the Lowdham Poetry Festival, where, on a blustery day, under a tent, Roy read some of his poems and played a little piano (he was a fine Jazz pianist). Roy talked with my partner about their shared experience in teacher training and we were given his new and selected, The Dow Low Drop, the first of many books that Roy signed for us. A few years later, planning the Beeston International Poetry Festival, I suggested we try and get Roy to give a reading, though he didn\u2019t get about much, being wheelchair-bound. His friend, the poet, Ann Atkinson was still alive then, and&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3348"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3368,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3348\/revisions\/3368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}