A senior lecturer in English and American studies at one of our livelier universities, himself a fine poet, was talking to me on the telephone. A student had decided to write something about London poetry - was there any? He'd toyed with David Gascoyne's A Vagrant ('They're much the same in most ways, these great cities'), but decided that Paris was the principal focus there. He couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the post-Olsonian outpourings of the Seventies, most notably Allen Fisher's Place, Place was set largely south of the river, a nowhere defined by unnecessary particulars. Now Roy Fisher, he could do something with him - but the man had the poor taste to base his mythology on Birmingham.

LRB 5 October 1995 | PDF Download